


The Killing Moon (continued)

by Zatnikatel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2009-10-18
Updated: 2009-10-18
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:19:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 58,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zatnikatel/pseuds/Zatnikatel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><b>Sequel to The Woods are Lonely, Dark and Deep</b><br/><b>Warnings</b> Language; references to torture, m/m noncon</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Killing Moon (continued)

**Author's Note:**

> **Sequel to The Woods are Lonely, Dark and Deep**  
>  **Warnings** Language; references to torture, m/m noncon

  
**15\. Scary Monsters and Super Creeps**   


Dean is vaguely aware for a while, though he isn't sure how long for. He just lies there, and by increments the pain nudges the edges of his consciousness; a tweak here, a twinge there. Pretty soon it's a good, hard pinch, and it gradually starts working up into a burn, into hands working his leg in ways it was never meant to be worked, hands pressing down, squeezing, twisting. And God help him because he doesn't want to open his eyes and be back there, but he knows now that he is, can sense the darkness, can hear the crickets, can hear someone something, _the dog, maybe?_ breathing right up next to him. He can hear her shrill voice, _shut up you big baby_ , and he knows she's right there. He thinks it's wrong, someone's coming for him, coming to get him, and he know she'll just get madder but he whispers it anyway, quiet as he can. "Please come get me… please somebody, come get me, this isn't right…"

Whatever, _whoever_ , is lying beside him stirs, and he freezes in abject terror, hopelessness, because he knows what's coming next. "Lee. Please. Don't."

And a cool, gentle hand rests on his cheek. "You're Dean, not Gabe," a voice murmurs. "You're dreaming. Open your eyes and you'll see."

"No… just. Don't hurt me again," he chokes, and he thinks, _what a wuss, what a fuckin' gutless, yellow, chickenshit coward_ , but he begs because it's all he has left. "Please. Don't."

"Trust me," she says, and it's just a breath in his ear. "Trust me. Open your eyes."

So he does, because he knows that when they say jump he's supposed to ask how high. He stares into pale blue eyes, and it spills out of him. "They're not here, are they? They're not here. Not here."

He has enough presence of mind to know he sounds like a lunatic rocking in the corner of a padded cell, but the relief is so many shades of _fuckin' awesome_ , and he heels his eyes against the sting of tears. And she must be lying up next to him, because she puts her arms around him and it's safe, he can lean in and be held, and stutter out broken, meaningless sounds, and be comforted by more than the thought of slicing into his arteries and taking the easy way out.

"Is he alright?"

A voice Dean knows, low and concerned.

"No," she says. "But he will be."

He claws fierce, desperate handholds in her tee and clings to it: the thought that he _will_ be.

Sam isn't really sure how much is sinking in as his brother stares blearily at him from the mattress. "Are you getting any of this, Dean?"

There's no answer, so he tries a new tack. "How's the pain?"

"Painful," Dean punches out through gritted teeth.

It's something at least, Sam supposes, and he continues. "So, we've looked through the rest of the journals and it seems Gabe basically got stranded up here with his brother one winter. The brother bought the farm, and there was no game, so…" He stops as his brother stares owlishly at him again. "Dean, are you getting any of this?" he repeats.

Dean licks his lips carefully, speaks slowly, laboriously. "The perimeter. Is it defended?"

Sam sighs. "Dean, we've been through this twice now. We laid salt, painted the sigils. Bender hasn't shown up since we got here, and we haven't heard the wendigo either."

Frowning, Dean mutters, "There's something… it's just there in my head. Something important. About the perimeter. Defenses. Can't remember." He knuckles his temple hard, closes his eyes and grunts in frustration.

"Dean, it's safe," Sam says, a tad sharp now because _dammit_ , he knows what he's doing. "I know how to do the job. Don't worry about it. Just – rest."

Dean gazes at him for a second, fist still kneading his brow, eyes tired, red-rimmed and swollen. Sam wonders if he can even remember breaking down, and Hudak rocking him back to sleep.

"Gabe Bender… you were saying. Something about Gabe Bender…" Dean mutters then, and he sounds bone-tired. "Run that by me one more time?"

Sam sighs, thinks maybe the meds weren't such a good idea after all. "You're spaced, dude. How do you feel?"

His brother's eyes suddenly grow flinty, his voice stronger. "Like I stepped in a fuckin' bear trap, Sam," he says, pointedly. "How do you think I feel?"

Well, he walked right into that one. "I'm sorry," Sam says. "It's just—"

"I know. I know."

The hostility is gone as swiftly as it appeared, and Dean suddenly looks utterly wretched. Sam wonders if his face is a mirror of his brother's, shadowed with regret, sorrow, grief. "Dean," he starts. "Once you're able to walk we can—"

"No. Don't. Just – _don't_. I don't want to talk about him right now." It's tight and clipped, and Dean blinks his eyes hard shut, keeps them clenched tight.

Sam knows that feeling of just not wanting to see, refusing to, remembers it intimately, _his heart… it's damaged… we can't work miracles… I really am sorry_. He nods, bites his lip. "So. Anyway. Looks like Gabe Bender – the real one – built this cabin back around 1846 or so, and got snowed in here with his brother in the winter of 1859. And, uh, he… well. Ate him." He shrugs.

"And enjoyed the other white meat so much he started snacking on anyone in the ballpark," Dean manages.

"Pretty much," Sam agrees. "Hence, the family tradition."

"Still think it's a leap," his brother grouses. "Fuckin' bendigo."

"It's all there in the journals, Dean." Sam throws a look over at Hudak, sitting at the table paging through one of the master of horror's doorstop schlock horror offerings, clears his throat loudly, and she glances over. "It's all right there in the journals, Kathleen, isn't it?"

She picks up one of the volumes, waves it at them, parrots, "It's all right there in the journals."

Dean glances back and forth between them, narrows his eyes balefully. "You and her are like a fuckin' pincer movement these days."

"They paid it forward," Sam continues. "They all got involved, siblings, wives, kids. Right up to Missy and her brothers."

Dean huffs. "If that's true, then how come only Gabe turned?"

"Well we don't know for sure that it was just him," Sam says slowly, thoughtfully. "Maybe there were others, maybe they went elsewhere. We know how territorial these things are."

"Or there could be a whole family of the damn things out there," Dean bitches. "Could be like the fuckin' Waltons, for Christ's sake. Good night Mary fuckin' Ellen. John Boy. The ugly one with the teeth. Or the Brady Bunch." He shudders, closes his eyes and rubs his brow, and when he speaks again he sounds young and unsure. "Sorry. Head's fuzzy. Please… just run that by me again. How this all leads to me?"

Sam takes it slow, infinitely patient, talks like he's talking to a sick child, and in so many ways he is, because his brother is at the end of himself. "The Benders knew the woods, knew them well. They must have known this thing was out here, but they still came here. So they knew it wouldn't harm them, yes?"

Dean gives the barest nod, yawns.

"And we know it was watching you all."

"And so you think it thought I was one of them…"

"Yeah… it's the only explanation. It caught Lee's scent on you—Dean? You okay?" Sam stops abruptly as Dean swallows hard, covers his mouth with his hand. "Christ, I'm sorry… I didn't know how else to say it."

"I'm fine," his brother wheezes. "Nothing to throw up anyway."

Sam scratches his head, chooses his words damn carefully this time. "It thought you were a Bender. And it must have heard them call you Gabe."

"It's Gabe. And you think it thinks _I'm_ Gabe."

"Yeah, it must. There's no other reason for what it did… what it _said_."

"Kin…"

"Yeah, and we thought it meant related in some way but now we think it meant _literally_ the same. One and the same."

"So… it's Gabe."

"Yeah, it's Gabe."

"And I'm Gabe."

"Yeah, you're Gabe. But you're you too."

"And it's me."

"Yeah, and you're it."

"So… I'm me?"

"Yeah," Sam says, and he can't help sounding triumphant. "You're me."

"You mean me…"

"Yeah, you."

"Not you then…?"

"No, not me, you."

"So… I'm definitely me?"

"And you're it."

"And it's Gabe?"

"Yeah. And it's you."

"And it's me."

"Yep, that's it. Totally."

Dean frowns. "Okay. So you're saying… I'm me. And I'm Gabe. And it's Gabe. And I'm it. And it's it. And you're you. And it's… _me_?"

"Yeah, you got it." Sam leans back, looks expectantly at his brother, and Dean's expression is so much confusion. "Dean?" he prompts. "Are you getting this at all?"

Hudak snorts and Sam glances over at her.

"Who's on first?" she says, witheringly.

Sam frowns. "He gets it, Kathleen, don't worry."

Next to him Dean sighs. "Sam, uh… I don't get it."

Bobby has turned it over every which way but comes up with the same answer every damn time.

Sounds. He definitely heard sounds, and not too far off either, a commotion, voices yelling, and here's the thing: he could swear it was Sam. And that makes no sense because Sam's priority these days is his brother, and if there's one time he should be prioritizing his brother and getting him out of these damn woods and away from this damned hunt, it should be after hauling him out from under a tree.

So it must be his imagination, because it must be days by now and he knows damn well they'll have no clue where he is, because this isn't a mine and because he's already torn up the map they don't have and fashioned it into a dawn patrol of paper airplanes he's been spending his free time – which he has a damned lot of just now – trying to pitch into the gaping eye sockets of a strategically positioned skull.

"Fuckin' Benders," he gripes irritably. "What's the world coming to when people dig ten-foot-deep mantraps to store human beings in? Asswads."

He stands up, gives a few cursory hollers of his own, but his voice just echoes around the pit and he knows it won't carry any further than the top of the dirt walls. He sits back down again, halfheartedly sends a paper plane pinwheeling into the air.

"Bullseye."

He could have sworn it was Sam's voice.

Dean cracks his eyes despite the lethargy, despite the red-hot needles stabbing through his leg. He can just make out his brother slumped over the table, and Hudak sitting opposite him, reading by candlelight. He clears his throat, rasps out the words. "Hey. Read to me?"

She doesn't startle, just picks up the candle, pads over on socked feet, wedges the flickering light up against the fireplace, finds her place and starts reading, quiet and calm. "All summer long they'd show you pictures of cars under hoods and cars under tarps until you were fair dying to know what they looked like underneath… brand new she was. Had the smell of a brand-new car and that's about the best smell in the world—"

Dean sniggers as he cuts in. "Except maybe for—"

"I think we're past that, Dean," Hudak says tartly. "Don't you?"

He shrugs, says, "I guess," and he finds it surprisingly easy to drop his usual mode of defense. "You okay with it?" he asks cautiously.

Hudak shifts back up against the wall and makes herself comfortable. "Yeah. I guess I'm okay with it. Are you okay with it?"

"Are you kidding me?" Dean blurts out, and he knows he sounds so fuckin' naively enthusiastic, can hear what sounds like the echo of his fourteen-year-old self in his voice. "I mean…" He clears his throat awkwardly. "Yeah, I'm okay with it."

She smiles slightly, picks up the book again.

"So…" he pokes a little further. "You wouldn't change anything?"

Thinking, frowning. "I'd have you shower first."

Dean smiles what he knows damn well is one of those gormless high-school jock smiles he used to switch on at will to charm more dim, stacked cheerleaders than he can remember into janitors' closets all across the lower forty-eight. "I was really hoping it wasn't just a pit—"

"Look," Hudak cuts him off. "I know what it meant to you and it means a lot that it was me. More than I can say, really." She's looking him right in the eye and her gaze doesn't waver. "But realistically, it isn't going anywhere and I don't think we should think too much on why it happened. It was…" She trails off, flaps a hand.

"Heat of the moment," Dean murmurs. "I guess."

"Yeah," she nods. "I think that's exactly what it was."

Dean swallows dryly. "So. It's behind us then. No big deal."

Hudak smiles, winks. "Nope. No big deal."

She reads on and now it's just words, droning, collections of letters and syllables that Dean doesn't really hear. His eyes drift over to his brother, Sam's mophead resting on his arm. _I'm leaving you_ , he thinks, _and I don't want to, but Christ this just isn't going to end pretty_. He fancies he maybe thought that very thing when the dog was ripping into him and maybe he didn't even really fight it. It is what it is, and he muses on Marshall Hall, who had a life, made a contribution. He paid his taxes, maybe was going to get married, have kids and watch them crawl, walk, graduate and start their own families so that he could cuddle his grandkids before retiring to Florida and dying in his sleep, an old man who made a small but significant mark on one small fraction of the world.

If only it hadn't been for Dean Winchester, who gave nothing and deserved no more in return. "What goes around comes around," he whispers.

"Hmmm?"

Dean slants his eyes back to Hudak to find her studying him. "Nothing," he grunts.

Hudak looks down again, reads on, her voice soft, maybe even comforting if Dean was really listening to it. But he isn't, because his leg isn't alright, the burn is stabbing that fact into his nerve endings every time he breathes in. He can feel his temperature rising, feels nauseous, feels a throb in his head that pummels his skull from the inside out. And _Christ_ , but he's been here before, with boring regularity, gazed at the flip side, leapt into the dark, and he's twisted in mid-air and landed on his feet every damn time.

Something tells him he isn't getting out of this one. He swallows thickly. "Kathleen…"

"Hmmm?" she responds again.

"I need to tell you some things," Dean says, soft.

"Tell me some things?" She lifts her head, raises her eyebrows, puzzled.

"Some things that you'll need to tell him," he clarifies, flicking his gaze in the direction of his slumbering brother.

Hudak shoots a look at Sam and then focuses on Dean again, and he can see her figure it out, see realization track her features. "Oh, no way," she chides. "That isn't going to happen, Dean, don't—"

"Listen to me," he jumps in, and he's urgent but he doesn't snap, keeps his voice level. "I've done this enough times to know that unless you can beam me out of here I'm not going anywhere. I saw the trap, Kathleen. I saw what you were picking out of my leg, and it's fuckin' killing me already." Understatement of the year, and for a second Dean is in his head, tucked up next to Bobby on the porch swing, and Bobby is reading to him, _now just imagine how it feels, when first your toes and then your heels, and then by gradual degrees, your shins and ankles, calves and knees, are slowly eaten, bit by bit…_ "You ever hear that poem where the kid gets eaten by a lion and it starts with his legs?" he says with a grimace.

"Pain," Hudak says quickly. "I'll get you something for the pain, and we'll need to change the dressing, get some more of the antibiotic on there and—"

"Kathleen," Dean persists. "Please. Don't. Leave it for now. Just – listen to me. Please."

"But it's time we—'"

"He's going to need to hear this," Dean says. "And he can't hear it from me because he'll know what it means if I tell him. He'll know it means this isn't going to turn out the way he wants it to. So you have to tell him. You'll be the only one who can."

He doesn't wait for a response, just starts pouring it out, and Hudak doesn't react, doesn't nod, doesn't blink, doesn't acknowledge, just sits, as talks at her, his eyes never straying from hers. "These are the things I want you to tell my brother, Kathleen," he says softly. "I want you to tell him he's the best thing I ever did. I want you to tell him that when I was a kid and I missed my mom, it was him falling on his fat, diapered ass in the dust and laughing that made me laugh again. I want you to tell him that I sang him back to sleep when he cried. I want you to tell him I remember his first steps, and they happened on August 14, 1984, at the Malabar Motel on route 42 in Mansfield, Ohio. I want you to tell him he said his first real word in October 1984, at the Redstone Motel off route 87 in Casper, Wyoming, and it was my name. I want you to tell him I pulled his first loose tooth on July 4, 1987, at the Captain A V Nickels Inn off route 1 in Searsport, Maine, and the tooth fairy didn't take it, because I still have it."

Hudak is rapt as Dean pauses a beat and takes a breath, before continuing into the stillness. "I want you to tell him I taught him his letters and numbers, how to read and count and do all those things he can do better than I can now. I want you to tell him he never had a fancy baby book like other kids, with pictures and stuff, but that all of those things have been here in my head all these years, like they happened yesterday. I want you to tell him I was proud of him when he was a kid, living the life we live when he hated it, and I want you to tell him that now he's a man I'm even prouder of him, and that I want him to make something of himself. I want you to tell him that I love him. And that it was an honor. Can you tell him those things for me? Please?"

Hudak stays quiet, but she nods.

"My cell has our dad's number on speed dial," Dean finishes off wearily. "Number one. You're going to have to call him for Sam."

"Does your dad know what happened with Bender?" Hudak ventures softly.

"No. And please don't tell him."

"But don't you think he should know?"

Dean smiles barely. "It would destroy my dad. And I'm not having him whale on Sam for not finding me sooner."

"Okay."

"My dad might not get back to you real quick," Dean says, and she snorts. "It's just how the man is, Kathleen," he carries on neutrally. "He's got a whole different set of rules. So until he does, Sam's going to need help."

"He'll get it," she tells him. "Whatever he needs."

Over on the table Sam is snoring, and Dean grins. "I want you to tell him his fuckin' snoring drove me crazy." He shifts, can't help the wince, the gasp. "Christ."

"You need something for the pain?"

"I need a fuckin' drink."

Hudak leans over, rests her hand on his brow. "You're hot."

Dean smirks. "That's what they all say, Kathleen."

Her face doesn't crack into a smile. "I'm checking the leg, Dean."

"If it makes you happy, Kathleen, you check the leg," Dean says, and he lets his eyes drift closed on a sudden wave of fatigue that drifts over him like a cloud. "Won't do any good."

"Dean. _Dean_?"

Hudak's voice is sharp and alarmed, and it jolts Dean back to awareness. "Fine, I'm fine," he reassures, trailing it out long, in slow motion, because he's so tired he can't seem to form the words properly now. "Kathleen, you have to get him out of here," he murmurs. "He won't want to go, but if I stay here maybe Lee and that thing will too. Maybe they won't follow you if they know I'm here."

Her breath is cool in his ear again. "Lazy bastard. You're getting off your ass come the morning and going on this hike, Dean. Do you hear me?"

Dean flinches as she starts unrolling the bandage. "Sure. Race you— _shit_."

"I'm sorry…"

Chuckling harshly, Dean backtracks. "Thought you said you were okay with it."

"I'm not sorry about that," Hudak retorts, and she pauses, looking up from his leg and straight at him. "I meant what I said, Dean. I'm not sorry about that."

Dean nods, can't help the bitten-off groan as she pulls at the fabric.

"Sorry," she soothes. "It's stuck."

She pulls again, and Dean holds onto his pain this time. "Pretty messy down there, huh?"

"It's nothing that can't be fixed," she replies. "I'll have to soak off the dressing is all."

She bats it back fast, too fast, Dean knows. "If he won't leave, then you'll have to make sure he burns me after."

"I'm not having this discussion with you, Dean," she says firmly. "You're drugged, delirious, and badly injured. Non compos mentis, in fact."

"It has to be that way. Sam knows it, but he won't— _fuck_. Just. _Stop_." Dean blurts it all out as he jack-knifes up onto his elbows, biting into his lip so hard he thinks his teeth might have met in the middle. In the next second he can feel blood trickling warm down his chin. "My lip is never gonna get better," he chokes out bitterly, because surely he's due a break now. He slumps back down. "This isn't fuckin' fair. Christ."

"Dean?"

It's Sam, high-pitched and anxious, and that's all Dean needs right now. He pushes up again, forces the words out past the tremor in his jaws, quiet enough so his brother won't hear. "Kathleen. Don't forget what I said."

"It doesn't look so bad," Sam says as he squats next to Hudak, eyes flicking nervously from the ground meat that used to be his brother's ankle to Dean's face, white, hectically pink-cheeked, eyes watery with fever. "We'll get it cleaned up, you'll be good as new."

Hudak is easing away the rest of the gauze a fraction at a time, revealing a spider's web of red streaks bleeding out from puffy, angry looking punctures that ooze pus and serum, and Sam can't help himself, he blanches and barely restrains himself from clapping his hand to his mouth. He sees the look in his brother's eyes: acceptance, resignation.

"Need to get moving, Sam," Dean whispers. "At daybreak. You. Kathleen."

Sam's response comes out as nervous babbling, and he knows it. "When the sun comes up I was thinking we could McGyver a travois… there are enough branches we can use, and rope here. We sling a blanket across it, you lie back and enjoy the ride."

Dean smiles fondly. "Faster just the two of you. Come back for me with more salt rounds… a cart or something. Safer that way."

"I've been thinking about that," Sam presses on. "We need to level the playing field, get rid of one of these sonsofbitches if we can."

"God. Fuck… _Please_ …"

It starts out as speech, stretches out into something that Sam thinks sounds horrifically like a stifled wail of agony, and Dean pushes up, reaches down and swipes at Hudak in panic, sending her sprawling on her butt. "Fuckin' _stop_ that," he chokes. "You need to stop."

Dean's leg is kicking out now, but Hudak is back upright, puts her knee up on it to pins it down, darting Sam a look as Dean yelps. "I have to clear this mess out," she says calmly. "You'll need to hold him down Sam, because the leg cannot stay like this. He'll lose his foot."

Sam scrabbles up to his brother's head, heaves him back, and wraps his arms around his chest. "Jesus," he grates out. "If only we'd burned the damn body. If only we knew where the damn campsite was."

Hudak throws him a look, glances back down, looks up again. "Why burn it?"

"The bones hold him here. If we'd burned the bastard, this wouldn't be happening."

"But surely the bones can't still be there, Sam," Hudak throws out, adding, "keep him still."

Sam grunts with the effort of doing just that as Dean bucks in his grip. "I'm trying," he snaps. "And the bones must still be there or Bender wouldn't be here – Jesus Christ, Dean! No biting!" His right hand is pressed hard up against his brother's chest, and it feels like Dean's heart is driving along the rumble strip at a hundred and fifty miles per hour, thumping fit to burst out through his ribs. "If something pops out of your chest I'm killing you myself," Sam tells him. "Just pass out, for God's sake."

Dean hacks out another incoherent almost-yell, followed by a breathless, "I'm fuckin' trying to."

"I'm not doing any more," Hudak decides. "That's as much as I can get out. Uh. That was disgusting."

"Thank fuckin' Christ," Dean sighs out weakly, and he finally slumps loose and heavy against Sam.

Hudak sits back on her heels, reaches for the tub of antibiotic cream, and suddenly she rounds on Dean with a face like thunder. "If this is bothering you, Dean, you need to say. Don't lie there playing the hero while it gets worse. That isn't big and it isn't clever." She shakes her head, snatches up a gauze pad. "Okay. I need to dress it. It'll hurt but not like just now."

"Whatever," Dean answers balefully. "Nurse fuckin' Ratched." His eyes are huge, pinprick pupils, his face a sheen of sweat. "I need a drink," he forces out in snatches. "A _real_ drink."

"Water," Sam says, laying him down and pushing up.

"Forty-seven degrees, twenty-five minutes, thirty-eight seconds north," Hudak says abruptly. "Ninety-two degrees, fifty-six minutes, sixteen seconds west."

Sam goggles at her for a minute.

"It's where the campsite was," she says. "I stored the coordinates on my cellphone back then, before it died."

Sam goggles at her for another minute.

"There's a map shelved with the books," she goes on as she winds the bandage around Dean's leg. "It's pretty old. I checked it already for mines – there aren't any marked on it. We have a compass…"

"If we can triangulate our position, maybe we can find the campsite from here," Sam pick up, and he strides over to the shelves, kneels, and flicks through the books, retrieves the map. "That was sharp," he notes, and can't keep the excitement from his voice. "Storing the coordinates. It didn't even occur to me. Jesus, I can't believe we—"

Dean's voice is toneless when it cuts in. "She stored the coordinates because she was going to turn us in."

Sam is unfolding the map, laying it out on the floor, but he stops. It's quiet, and Hudak doesn't comment. "Is that true?" he prods uncertainly.

She shrugs. "I didn't follow through on it," she says simply.

"Because your phone died," Dean says.

Sam knows it's more a statement than it is a question.

"That's not the only reason," Hudak offers calmly.

Sam looks from her to his brother, and Dean's face is impassive. "If it means we can find the bones, Dean…" he says. "Well. That's all that matters, as far as I'm concerned." He squints at the faded map. "Dammit. Too dark to see properly… Kathleen, pass my flashlight over would you?"

"Sam, Sam," his brother says wearily. "This isn't worth it. Animals had at that body months ago, it's scattered to the four winds. You'll never find all the bones—"

"We don't know that for sure, Dean."

"This isn't something we can win, kiddo. I'm not going anywhere like this and I'm sure as fuck not letting you go out there alone." Dean is rubbing his head, scowling, agitated. "This ends here. You and her, out of here, at sunup."

It's not going down that way while Sam is still breathing. "We can do this," he counters firmly. "Drag you out of here. It's all planned."

"Sam, for the love of God…" Dean's voice trails off then, and he presses his palm to his head. "Christ," he mutters. " _Out_. Get out of my head. Fuck. He's here. He's _here_.

Hudak swivels her head around wildly, snaps, "Sam, you said that wasn't possible," even as she snatches out a hand to grasp the poker.

"It isn't," Sam insists, through his own rising tension. "Dean, is this a flashback? He can't be in here. We salted the perimeter."

"The perimeter," Dean wheezes, and now he's pushing up on to his ass, sliding back along the mattress. "Two-line perimeter Sam… separate lines of defense for both of them."

"That's what I did," Sam tells him. "More than one line. There are two sigil perimeters out there with salt lines in between, on the porch too, and sigils on the door. We salted the windows and there are sigils on the shutters. This place is sealed tight. There's no way—"

"But it's one of _them_ ," Dean hisses, and now there are sounds outside, now there are creaking boards, a familiar voice, thuds on the door. "It's one of _them_ … a fuckin' bendigo. Didn't you think to—"

His voice is drowned out by a frenzied hammering and battering at the cabin walls, enraged screeching, and Sam strides back across and drops to his knees right in front of Dean. "Think to what?" he hollers over the racket, as Hudak pushes the table up against the door. "Dean, think to _what_?"

"They're working as a _team_ ," his brother says harshly, and his eyes are frantic. "I asked you about the perimeter, you said it was all set."

"But it is," Sam assures him again. "I didn't miss anything – I tripled the defenses."

Dean falls back against the wall, drained, and Sam has to lean close to hear him now. "Separate lines of defense," he's muttering. "Bendigo breaks the salt line, Lee breaks the sigils… bendigo breaks the salt line, Lee breaks the sigils… _Teamwork_."

And it's so fucking fundamental that Sam should have laid the salt lines over the sigils, one solid line of both combined to keep both these bastards out, because now one of them is in there and the other won't be far behind. "Jesus," he sighs out, and almost before the word has left his mouth he sees his brother's eyes abruptly widen, hears Dean let out a low sound of distress that sets Sam's nerves on edge. "He's right behind me, isn't—" And suddenly Sam can't breathe, and all he can see is his brother's expression of shock and fright as he shrinks away.

"Sam! Christ!"

Hudak looms up, swings the poker, obliterates Bender and the arm he had forced up under Sam's chin, and Sam falls forward onto his hands, sucking in oxygen in huge, heaving pants. He hears Hudak yell out again from above him and he shoots bolt upright onto his knees, feels the poker hiss by him, missing his face by millimeters as he instinctively recoils. And all the time he's counting down the seconds he has left to grab the flaregun, the pistol, the silver bullets, and Jesus please let the pistol already be loaded and he _can't fucking remember_ if it is or not, and there's tugging at his shirt and Dean is pulling himself along on it, closer, muttering something about Kathleen, and Sam bats the hand away. "Dean, not now."

Then Bender is back, and now Sam can see the apparition has a method itself, because slowly, step by step, every time it materializes it's herding Hudak in the direction of the window, the shutters, and they're moving, rattling. Hudak is oblivious, backing towards them as she swings the poker, and Sam yells at her, because now he knows what his brother was trying to tell him. But it's too late, because the shutters burst open and glass shatters. The thing erupts through the opening and it already has Hudak gripped tight in its hand.

Sam is trapped himself, Bender phasing in during that split second when his horror froze his brain cells to a dead stop, and the ghost has its arm pressed up against Sam's windpipe again. He watches Hudak struggling, trying to twist out of the thing's grasp, and its gaping maw is leaning close, fangs readied, the kiss of death.

His vision is fading, graying out, the edges getting misty, but Sam is dimly aware of an explosion, and he falls to his knees, wincing at the sting of salt ricocheting up into his face. He shakes the stars out of his head and doesn't spare another second wondering how the hell Dean got hold of the gun, just crabs across the room to grab hold of Hudak's other arm. And now it's tug-of-war time, it's maybe even dislocated limbs time, because the thing isn't giving up without a fight.

Hudak's eyes are locked on Sam's, and she seems utterly calm, isn't making a sound. She just hangs on to his arm as he clenches his fingers tight around her wrist and pulls, and then she twists her head, leans down, and sinks her teeth into the thing's hand. It screeches, lets her go, and Sam spins her around, losing his grip. She crashes back against the table and collapses right there, arms flung wide.

"Fuck! Kathleen!" Sam yells, but there's nothing he can do about it because he's being flipped over onto his ass, and the thing has him by the ankles, already has him halfway out the window. He throws out his hands, desperate, holds on with all he has, and he can feel his fingernails digging into the soft wood of the shutters until, _thank Christ_ , Hudak grabs his hand.

But it isn't Hudak, it's Dean, and he's staring at Sam and biting hard on his lip, groaning out frustration and agony because there's no way he can hold on, no way he should even be upright. But he is, and now he's bracing, bracing with his mangled leg up against the window frame, and crying out with the pain of it. And Sam never wants to hear that hurt sound pass his brother's lips again, and never wants to be the reason for it if it ever does, so maybe this is best because he's damned if he's pulling Dean out with him.

"Let me go." Sam whispers out the words even though he knows Dean will never do that. "Dean, you have to let me go."

Hudak is rising and stumbling about in the background, flailing with the poker at Bender, and Sam knows she has Dean's back, that she'll do her damned best to get him out of there, and that her odds of success will improve marginally if he's keeping the wendigo occupied while she does it. He lets go of the windowsill, and he steadily, deliberately, peels his brother's fingers off his arm. He doesn't think Dean is even aware of what he's doing, because even though his brother's eyes are still locked on his, they're vacant, far-off.

And then Sam feels himself being snatched away, and his head thuds against something hard, _porch_ , before it all goes black.

"What happened? What happened?" he's whispering, because he isn't sure if he knows, isn't sure how he got here, a tumble of arms and legs, his strings cut.

He can hear bangs, crashes, shouting, feet clattering, and all at once he's grabbed under the shoulders, hauled across the floor, and dumped unceremoniously on something soft.

He stares into space and it's tranquil apart from the sound of someone crying, heaving, gulping sobs. "Why are you crying?" he murmurs. "Why are you crying?"

No one answers.

**16\. Extreme Ways**

Hudak weeps herself dry, and she doesn't wipe the tears away, just lets them rest there on her cheeks until every trace of moisture has evaporated and salt trails stiffen her skin, so that when she yawns she feels her face crack. After yawning, she finds she can't close her mouth. It hangs open, as if her jaws have been ripped off their hinges and left swinging in the wind, like broken saloon doors in some Old West frontier town. She sits there, stock-still and stupefied, knees bent, hands resting on the floor beside her, staring at some indefinable spot of nothingness in the air and _listening_.

Dean is slumped next to her on the mattress, finally oblivious after having spent seconds, minutes, or hours, she doesn't even know, asking her why she was crying, after she had galloped around the room like a Triple Crown winner, throwing down handfuls of salt at every point of entry.

She listens and all she can hear is his breathing, fast, shallow. No sounds from outside. Dead zone now, dead zone where it hunts. _Sam. Jesus_.

Sam's pack is regurgitating its contents all over the floor, and right there on top is Sam's gun. And Hudak's body finally catches up with the fact her brain is poking her in the ribs and saying it might be a good idea to have the gun with the bendigo-killing silver bullets in it close by and handy, so she crabs over there, snatches it up, rummages for the bullets, and scoots back.

But the trouble is, now she has the gun.

She weighs it in her hand and she looks at Dean, lying there, hair and face sweat damp, skin ashy, eyes shadowed, a frown line between his eyebrows even while he sleeps.

She thinks he might be dying.

And that's a problem, because right here in her hand is the solution.

 _What do I do?_ she wonders. Christ, it wouldn't be the first time she shot a downed man, and she recalls it now: Old man Bender, staring up with mocking, challenging eyes, daring her to pull the trigger. And she had. She had planted it right between his eyes, _here, have a third one, you murderous sonofabitch_ , had seen his momentary look of surprise, maybe even admiration, respect for the fact she'd had the cojones to do it.

For a second her head is full of how the sly gleam faded from his eyes and the blood started pooling around his head. She did it in cold blood, her hand steady, didn't flinch, didn't even bat an eyelid. And she hasn't felt guilt, or remorse, hasn't even really thought about it much apart from the time Bobby Singer told her she might want to consider cutting his boys a break if she didn't want to be up on charges herself. No, she blew the bastard away and strolled out into the yard to send Dean Winchester on his merry way to hell. She can't resist a wry chuckle, remembers what Sam said back then in the woods, how none of the mess that followed would ever have happened if she'd given him and his brother a ride.

Funny how one seemingly insignificant choice can change everything.

No, wait a minute. _Strike that_.

"Strike that," she says into thin air. "If you had just told me you were hurt, you stupid boy, I would have given you the ride," she hisses spitefully, and she even gives Dean a poke with the gun. "Everything would be fine. I could be writing fucking traffic citations right now if it weren't for you fucking Winchesters. Jesus."

Dean moans obliviously, and a muscle twitches under his eye.

"What do I do?" Hudak breathes. "What do I do, Dean? Do I just walk out of here right now, and leave you here for Bender and that thing to fight over? They don't want me. I could just go back to my dog and forget this mess ever happened." She looks at the door. "Behind door number one lies life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," she quips weakly. "What am I prepared to do?" She points the gun at the door. "Bang."

Dean is dying, she knows it because it was so clear that he knew it. "Them's the facts," she murmurs. The leg was a mess before he dragged himself off the mattress to try and get to his brother, and blood is seeping through the bandage again. The trap was a health hazard, and realistically his only hope was them getting him out of these woods to a hospital.

So. He can die up close and personal with Lee Bender's ghost while it drives him to insanity, or die spooning with Gabe Bendigo while it picks his brother's bones clean. And before that, he'll wake up and remember what happened, and then he'll insist they search for Sam, and Hudak will be doing exactly what she did all those weeks ago with the other half of the Winchester equation, while Dean fades away before her eyes. And then she can just go back to her dog and forget this mess ever happened.

Or he could die right here and now, without ever knowing, without ever waking up.

Hudak looks at the gun, looks at Dean. She wonders where would be best. "Head shot I guess," she muses. "Only knowing my luck, it'll ricochet off your thick skull and plug me right between the eyes." She shuffles up next to him, stares down. "Baby-face killer," she mutters, and she sits up on her knees, points the gun.

Her hands are shaking.

She lays the gun down, rubs at her cheek tiredly. "Guess I'll clean up the leg before you come round," she decides.

She hauls the first aid kit over, retrieves the antiseptic, liberally soaks the filthy, scarlet-drenched bandage, starts peeling it off, and wrinkles her nose. "Christ."

"That bad, huh?" Dean croaks.

Hudak claps her hand to her heart. "Fuck! Don't you do that to me you bastard."

Dean sniggers, just barely. "Got to stay frosty, Kathleen. And when you have a killshot, you damn well take it. You don't talk yourself out of it. Fuckin' amateur."

Shaking her head as she breathes her fright back down to manageable, Hudak carefully eases the dressing off the rest of the way. "You just lay there and let me point that thing at you," she snaps at him as she thinks on it, even though she knows she never would have done it. "Jesus, you're nine kinds of crazy. How did you know I wouldn't pull the trigger?"

Dean shrugs, slowly, painfully, like even that slight movement is a huge effort. "I didn't know."

"And still you lay there?" Hudak challenges him.

"And still I lay here." Dean doesn't move, just flops there looking broken, breath wheezing like it's an effort to get it in and out. "Are we protected?" he adds hoarsely.

"I laid salt. That's all. I don't know how to do the symbols." Hudak gestures down at the floor. "That's why I had the gun," she says meaningfully. "But it hasn't been back. The sun's coming up, so maybe it's gone to ground."

Dean stares back at her, and it's like he's daring her to say his brother's name. She peels her eyes away, delicately picks off the gauze, can't help lifting a hand up to her face at the mess she reveals, the puncture wounds a furious red, the surrounding skin mottled dark, and seeping blood and pus.

"Smells bad?" he fishes, and there is a knowing tone to his voice that she doesn't miss.

She nods, and he's calm, placid almost.

"Is it sweet, like fruit, or is it like ammonia?"

"I can't believe I'm sniffing your leg," Hudak jokes weakly as she leans down. "Sweet. And there's a lot of gunk in there that needs to come out."

Dean sighs, but he doesn't really seem surprised. "What does it look like? Color, I mean?"

"Green." Hudak can't help the grimace that forms on her face. "Isn't it always?"

"Not the gunk," Dean clarifies patiently. "The leg. The skin around the wounds."

"Well, red," Hudak tells him. "Purplish. Dark, anyway. That's bad isn't it?"

"Could be," Dean confirms ruefully before he backtracks, pushing himself up on the pillows. "Protection first. Sigils. Is there paper here? A pen?"

She has a notebook in the pack and Dean takes it with a shaking hand, draws the designs slowly, frowning and teasing his battered lip with the tip of his tongue as he concentrates. He sags back as he hands it to her, drained by the effort, and the paper shivers with his tremors as she takes it.

"Those three," he murmurs. "Repeat them to fill up the space and draw a line in between to join them up." He closes his eyes for a minute, breathes in deep, long. "Like a charm bracelet, see? Semicircles on the floor, in front of the door, the windows. Use the paint. Then you trickle salt over the paint lines." He rests his forearm over his eyes then.

She has to ask him, wants to think he has a plan, a solution. "Dean. What are—"

"Nope."

She tries again. "But what are we going to do?"

He makes a harsh sound of exasperation. "I'm thinking."

Sam opens his eyes to blackness. He stifles a groan, waves his hand about uselessly in the air, has to settle for walking his fingers up his body, guided by his shirt buttons, to get to his incredible exploding head and try to soothe it into submission. "I'm blind," he mutters.

"You ain't blind, boy."

"And I'm hearing things," Sam goes on. "I've gone mad. I knew it was only a matter of time."

It's quiet then, because it was his imagination and there's _just no way_.

"Your ears are fine too, Sam."

And it turns out Sam is leaning up against something warm and solid, and he turns into the embrace and holds on for dear life, and Bobby holds on just as hard, hugs him back, rubs his back with strong, capable hands, and tells him everything will be fine.

But even while he sobs out his relief, Sam is thinking of that split-second decision to grab Hudak and hang on, and he's replaying it in his mind, in slow motion, and thinking he should have let it fucking well have her and be damned, and then picked up his brother and run for the hills while it was distracted.

Dean lies with his face covered all the while she spray paints the sigils. _Sam_ , he thinks. _Jesus. Fuckin' idiot_. And he feels useless, feels like the failure he is. One job to do, to take care of his kid brother, to put him first, to keep him safe, and he fucks it up grandly.

His foot nags endlessly at him. It isn't the agonizing bolts of white-hot pain he remembers feeling when he planted it square on the wall, but the fierce ache isn't far off it. It's like one of those cartoon bumps on the head, he muses, like the ones Tom and Jerry sprout every time they whale on each other with skillets, and Dean wonders if it would literally be throbbing and thrumming, ballooning in and out like it grew its very own heartbeat, if he dared to look at it. It's not good, because he's got places to go, people to see, things to do. He has to find his brother, and for a second he feels the horror he has buried deep under the mental equivalent of the cave-in he hauled Sam across start shifting the rocks aside, start pushing a grimy, clawed hand out to grab him and start shaking him viciously by the throat, and _no_. No. Not cracking up now. Man with a plan. Once he comes up with it. And once he does, man, this is _so fuckin' over_.

He peeps out from under his arm at Hudak as she studies the paper carefully, sprays the shapes, squints, rubs out, starts again. Got a civilian involved too, as if losing his brother isn't enough. He's going for the record, that's for sure. And Christ, but he wonders if he'd have done what his brother did had it been Sam lying here in his place. He wonders if he would have just stopped, watched, stared into her eyes as it wrestled her all the way out of the window and vanished, wonders if he really might have thrown the fucker a bone to keep it occupied while he picked up his brother and ran for the hills. He wonders, and he doesn't know the answer.

Hudak stands up, scratches her head as she examines her artwork before turning and placing the paint can on the table. She scoops out a jug of salt from the large burlap sack on the floor and starts laboriously trickling salt over the paint, pushing stray grains up towards the lines, keeping it neat and tidy, until the job is done.

Dean emerges from behind his arm as she walks back across the room to kneel down beside his foot, and he steels himself because he knows damn well what has to be done and that he'll be lucky if the shock doesn't finish him. "So we need to clean that ankle up," he broaches, and she flicks him an uneasy look. "This is how it goes down," he continues, forcing a calm he doesn't feel. "You need to haul that table over here. There's a rope in my pack. You secure the good foot to the table leg, nice and tight, you hear? That'll keep your workspace clear."

Her expression turns puzzled but Dean smiles at her, reassuring, and he raises his hands. "And then you cuff my hands to the fireplace," he goes on easily. "Just there, the fender, see? That way you won't get hurt when you start in with the knife."

Hudak shoots bolt upright again, stumbles away to stands at the table, leaning forward onto her hands. "I can't do that," she chokes out. "It's one thing to have Sam hold on to you, but this – _no_. I can't strap you down and do this to you."

Dean is quiet for a minute, clears his throat. "But my brother isn't here to hold me down this time, Kathleen," he says, keeping it reasonable. "I can't do this unless you secure me. You _will_ get hurt. Do you hear me? I _will_ hurt you if you don't bench me for this. I won't be able to help myself."

She spins, hollers at him, sudden fury turning her cheeks pink. "How dare you make me do this," she scathes at him. "How dare you and your brother come to my town and put me through this…"

Dean doesn't even try to interrupt, because her rage is too many kinds of awesome to cut off in mid-flow.

"I've had it. _To here_. Christ on a bike. There were two other officers on duty that day, but you had to pick me. Why? Huh? I know why! Because you thought you'd switch on the million-dollar smile and I'd just fall at your feet, you… you…"

"Man-whore?" Dean prompts dryly.

"And I'm fucking terrified!" she thunders back, as if he never spoke. " _Terrified_."

And at that, Dean's flippancy is abruptly gone, spilling away like his water broke or something, and he can feel his face crumple as he yells back just as loudly. "I'm fuckin' terrified too, Kathleen. My brother is out there." His hands fly up to his eyes, and he roars out in rage, frustration, breathes in sobbing gasps. "My brother is out there. With that thing. And maybe with _Bender_. Who is corporeal when he wants to be." His voice is harsh, and as desperate as the pictures that flit through his mind's eye. "Do you understand what that could mean for my brother, Kathleen? That sonofabitch raped me. Do you understand what that could mean for my brother? Do you _understand_?"

Hudak's mouth flaps for a few seconds until she grits her teeth, stares at the floor, and Dean wonders if she maybe even runs through her new mantra a few times before she stalks over to his pack, tips it upside-down, plucks the rope out from the pile.

"Just fucking admit you picked me because I'm female," she snaps as she starts hauling the table over towards the mattress.

"This face is currency, Kathleen," Dean confirms weakly, muffled by his arms. "Of course I picked you because you were the only woman. I'm not stupid."

"I could have been gay for all you knew," she retorts.

"I would have cured you of that, you can bet on it," he parries.

She throws him a marrow-freezing look as she pushes the table the rest of the way, grunting with the effort as it grinds across the floor, and Dean thanks God for good, solid, well-made furniture that's going to hold him in one place while he suffers, squirms and maybe even screams. Hudak squats and loops the rope around the table leg and his good ankle, making a few passes before she knots it and reaches round her back for the cuffs.

"Are you wearing a belt?" he says quietly.

Wordlessly, she unhooks it, slithers it out from her jeans, and hands it over.

"You'll need to sit on the leg," he adds. "High up. Pin it down."

She bites her lip. "I don't. Think I can—"

"Yeah, you can," Dean cuts in, gentle now. "Listen to me. My dad and my brother have tied me down and dug God knows what out of me more times than I can even remember. They've stitched me up with wood splinters and fishing line, even safety pins one time. See this?" He pulls up his tee, points to a livid, blotched scar above his right hip. "I broke open a bullet, sprinkled the gunpowder on there and lit it up myself. I've superglued myself closed before now, Kathleen. And three months ago I was electrocuted and had a heart attack, and—"

"A heart attack?" She pales, swallows.

"It's fine," Dean hurries out. "I'm fine. It's fixed. Long story. But I'm not going into cardiac arrest during this, I promise. I can take a licking and keep on ticking, every damn time, and you know that… you saw me after Bender did his thing." He pauses, smiles. "Whatever you hear, it won't be the worst pain I've ever been in. Not by a country mile. And I'll probably pass out anyway."

Hudak takes a deep breath, visibly steadies herself, nods. "I'll do it."

Dean puts the belt between his teeth and she cuffs his wrists to the fender. And she starts, and it turns out Dean lied, because while this isn't the worst pain he's been in, it most definitely is within a country mile of it, maybe even as close as being in the ballpark of it. It's _blow-the-top-of-his-head-off_ pain that has him biting off strangled cries, locks the muscles of his jaw and neck, makes his body rigid with agony, makes his back arch and flex in new and exciting ways, since it's one of the few parts of him that he can move, makes his hips judder as he tries to bounce and roll her off, makes him batter his head on the mattress so hard he can feel the floor through its bulk, makes his vision tunnel, makes spots dance before his eyes, makes him think he might hurl so hard he'll turn himself inside out with the force of his retching.

But unfortunately it isn't the kind of pain that makes him pass out.

Sam wakes up again with his head lolling on Bobby's shoulder. "It's so damn good to see you, Bobby," he breathes. "We just. Jesus. We really thought—"

Bobby cuts in. "It's here with us Sam. So keep it down. No sudden moves."

Sam tenses, darts his eyes about in the darkness. "Where?"

"Ahead of us and to the right. It's asleep."

Squinting in the darkness, Sam waits for his pupils to enlarge sufficiently, and then he can just make out its curled up bulk, feels his nerve endings freeze in ice-cold fear. "Christ," he whispers. "What do we do? How do we—"

"It isn't ready to deal with us yet," Bobby says, casual almost.

Sam finds his knuckle is in his mouth, and he bites down hard on it for a minute. "Has it been coming back here when it isn't after us? And you've been here with it and it hasn't—"

Bobby sniggers. "It's working up to me, boy. It's got a hiker or two to finish first, Kathleen's cop friend too. She was alive when I got here, didn't last much longer."

Sam shakes himself out of his stupor. "What about you? Are you okay? Has it hurt you?"

Bobby shifts, and Sam can just make out his head shaking. "Nope. Had a headache when I got here, but it hasn't come anywhere near me. It's even feeding me."

"Feeding you?" Sam ponders. "Why?"

"To keep some meat on the bones is my guess," Bobby says ruefully. "It isn't dense, that's for sure." He sighs. "You've been here for coming up on three hours, drifting in and out. You know what day it is?"

Sam thinks, scratches his head, glances up at skinny streaks of light filtering through from above. "No… I lost all track." He scuffs a hand through his hair and winces. "And I hit my head. Is that daylight? I know it's about a day since the tree fell down… no, more… must be two. I think. Bobby, are you sure you're not hurt?"

"I'm fine, boy. Thing knocked me out of the way as the tree fell." Bobby pauses for a second, continues haltingly. "Sam. Your brother. Is he…?"

Pulling his knees up, Sam parks his arms, rests his brow on them and thinks about his reply.

"Sam…?" Edgy now, sharper.

"God, Bobby… he… Jesus. It just goes from bad to worse. He's hurt real bad." Sam trails off, feels his throat swell, his eyes water, and he has to blink hard, sniff it back in.

"The tree didn't hit Dean, I'm sure it didn't." Bobby's voice is rusty, has a tremor in it, and fuck, Sam just can't bear to tell him, but he has to. So he does.

"Not the tree… he was running. He stepped in a bear trap. We got it off him, but." He has to stop, has to breathe deep for a few seconds. "His leg. It's a mess. Infected. We managed to get him to the Bender cabin. There was morphine there, we gave it to him to get the trap off. Vicodin too. But he's—"

"Just – wait a second," Bobby cuts in. "Spool back. What Bender cabin? How the hell did this happen?"

The words tumble out of Sam. "We were trying to get away, we saw the cabin in the trees. It's the Bender cabin, the one Doc Swenson told us about, remember? Their initials are carved everywhere. Bender initials, _Bs_ , and there are journals there. A first aid kit too. We're doing our best, but his leg's a mess, Bobby, it's—"

"Wait, slow down," Bobby interrupts again. "So this thing came back for him after it took me?"

"No, no…" Sam sinks his head in his hands. "That's just it. He wasn't running from the wendigo. He was running from Lee Bender."

"Having a flashback you mean?" Bobby asks. "And he bolted, like back at my place?"

"No," Sam says softly. "He was running from Lee Bender. We saw him. We all saw him… he came at us. We didn't bring enough salt rounds… Kathleen fought him off with the anchor chain from the trap."

"Bender is out there?" Bobby barks, almost simultaneously darting a look over at the thing and hastily muting the outburst to a hiss.

"We never burned the body," Sam reminds him bleakly.

"So all that twitching… your brother could _see_ him? And he never said?" Bobby is horrified, aghast. "Jesus, I will wring that boy's neck when I get hold of him."

"He thought he was going crazy, Bobby." Sam puts it out of his head, the awful desperation in Dean's eyes. "That he was imagining it because of the wendigo. But seeing Lee must have been what flipped him back into Gabe. We thought it was – something else. But—"

"He flipped back into Gabe?" The old man is newly appalled, and Sam hurries on.

"Not for long… it was right after you were taken. He helped us find one of the mines. Turns out Lee had shown it to him. We were hoping it might have you stashed there, but it dead-ended. Looked like it was an old lair, there were bones." He leans back stretches out his legs now. "Jesus, he groans. "I can't believe I missed Bender."

Bobby's tone is gentle for all his shock. "Not your fault, boy. We couldn't have expected this. Double whammy. Christ."

"You don't understand," Sam insists. "When he was Gabe he was trying to tell me Lee was out there, told me he kept catching sight of him in the trees, that he could hear him in his head all the time. But then when we got to the mine it was like it just switched off… he said it was the first time his head had been clear."

Bobby sighs. "Iron."

Sam nods. "There's more," he says. "Are you sitting down?"

"Been doing nothing but the last couple of days," Bobby growls.

"This thing… the wendigo." Sam glances over at it where it slumbers, wonders if it might hear him simply because he's talking about it, half expects it to throw a pillow at him and holler at him to shut up so it can sleep. "The initials… the cabin has a whole bunch of them carved into one of the roof beams, and one of them looks like a G. We found a bunch of journals and it looks like this thing was one of them back in the day."

"Bendigo," Bobby murmurs.

"Yeah, but not just any bendigo." Sam leans in closer, confidential. "It _is_ a G. The initial. The journals were Gabe Bender's, because, what the heck – it turns out there was one." He throws up his hands, lets them flop back down onto this thighs. "He built the cabin, back in the last century, got snowed in up here, ate his brother. As you do."

Sam can just about make out Bobby's open mouth. "Gabe Bender," the old man breathes. "Jesus… so that's why it never hurt him out in the woods with Kathleen."

Sam nods. "It must be. I think it thinks it's him. Or he's it. Or something like that."

They sit there in silence for a few minutes before Bobby speaks again.

"So how is it you're still here, boy? I mean – I'm glad to see you, but Jesus, Sam. Not _here_. You should be long gone."

"Dean wouldn't leave without you, Bobby," Sam replies, and he shrugs at the old man's headshake. "I tried to talk him out of it… we didn't have the map, that thing was out there. I wanted to get him back to Hibbing, come back with a map and find the other mines. But he was adamant, so we figured we'd search around the one we found, give it a day before heading back into town. That's pretty much when Bender showed himself."

"And your brother rabbited," Bobby surmises.

"Yeah, straight into the trap," Sam confirms. "Bender chased us to the cabin… there was salt there."

"Yeah," Bobby murmurs. "To preserve the meat."

"We fought him off, and I laid a perimeter, salt lines and sigils." Sam hears his voice crack as he goes on. "I thought we'd be safe."

Bobby nods slowly in the darkness. "But you laid separate lines."

Sam doesn't even reply, just waits for the reprimand, but the old man is perfectly neutral if regretful.

"You couldn't have known they were in cahoots with each other."

"You knew!" Sam chokes out bitterly. "You just worked it out without the details. Dean knew."

"Kid, I've been a hunter for thirty years," Bobby says gently, and he reaches out a hand, squeezes the back of Sam's neck.

"Dean hasn't even been alive for thirty years," Sam counters.

Bobby nods again in the dark. "Well, your brother… he's a whole different breed of horse. With him it's instinctive. He doesn't learn it – he already knows it. Best damn hunter I ever saw, your brother. Smart as a box full of monkeys."

"He was trying to tell me. About the perimeter." Sam bites his lip. "I shot him down. He was doped. I didn't listen to him. I should have trusted him."

Over in its corner the thing stretches, shifts, and they both freeze for a minute until it slumps back down.

"Sam, you were out of the game for… what, two years? Three?" Bobby says then. "Don't blame yourself for this. Your brother won't. You're playing catch-up. No weekend tennis player's going win the US Open, boy. It takes constant practice to get to where your brother is on the totem. You'll get there."

"But I should have listened to him," Sam says miserably.

"Yeah, you should have," Bobby says, but his tone is still even, non-judgmental. "And all this means is that next time you will."

Sam can feel the old man's eyes on him in the dark, swallows hard, gathers himself. "Okay," he says. "What's the plan for getting out of here?"

Dean breathes through the pain as he forces spaghettio-slop down from a can, reflects on the fact that breathing through pain while forcing slop down from a can, and concludes that deja vu can be pretty damn familiar sometimes. He glances over at Hudak, sees her watching him. "Ever had that weird feeling you did something already?" he remarks.

She forks up her own slop, sighs. "What are we going to do?" she says.

Dean ignores the question for a few minutes, keeps chewing as he thinks about maybe just never answering, about staying in that moment forever, and fuck knows that won't be long for him. He revels in the brief luxury of not being the one figuring out the plans, deciding the strategy, pondering the tactics, making the mistakes. _No responsibilities_. But, "I'm going get my brother back, Kathleen," he says finally, and he manages to inject a shot of confidence into the statement even though he's tight-chested and breathless, can still feel the ache of strained muscles and tendons in his neck and shoulders.

Hudak stares him down for a minute. "Just like that? Because I'm looking all around me Dean, and I don't see your stunt double anywhere."

Dean nods his appreciation at her sarcasm, reaches up a hand to rub hard at his neck. "Kathleen," he rasps, coughs to clear his throat. "I think what we have here is a failure to communicate. But I'm good with it, being as you aren't coming anyway."

He waits for the explosion, but after a moment she smiles, pushes up onto her feet. "We'll get you packed up then, shall we?" she tells him, with faked brightness. "I'll put some dressings in your pack… the gun, bullets. Will you need food, you think—"

"I'm not leaving him out there with those things," Dean cuts in, firm.

"Oy," Hudak barks out, and she facepalms before sitting down on the floor opposite him and fixing him with a look that is way softer than Dean expected, one that throws him off, maybe even worries him a little. "What do think of this whole set-up you have going with your brother Dean?" she says. "Because… God. You know, when Bender had you before and we were searching, I asked Sam what he thought you might have wanted for him and he said you'd want him to be happy, to live for you."

Hudak stops and waits like she's expecting Dean to say something. And he finds he's got nothing, because he's pushing it away and down, the acknowledgment that this fuckin' _dependency_ isn't normal, that maybe it's a millstone anchoring him and his brother as the tide rises higher and higher, high enough to drown them both in unwanted responsibility.

"Don't you think he'd want you to do the same for him?" Hudak breaks into the silence.

"My brother isn't dead, Kathleen," Dean mutters back at her, and maybe he finds he can at least try to broach the fucked-up mess that is family for him. "And anyway, it isn't that simple. It's my job. He's my brother."

Hudak nods. "He's your brother, Dean. But he's not your job. Don't you want more than just being your brother's keeper? Don't you think _Sam_ wants more for you than that? More for you than this life, and when I say life I mean it in the loosest sense of the word, Dean, because this, this _thing_ that you have, that you do – it isn't life. It isn't the life you deserve."

Dean glowers at her and reverses into denial. "I'm happy with my—"

"You're what, twenty six?" she jumps in again. "Twenty seven? Don't you think about _real_ life? About a home, kids maybe?"

"It isn't that simple," Dean says again, and she exhales sharply.

"Yes, Dean, it is," she counters, with a note of finality that tells Dean she knows the conversation is over, and that it changed nothing. "It really is that simple if you let it be. If you want it to be."

Dean waits for what he hopes is a decent interval before he prods, "Will you help me get my boots on?"

"Yes, I will help you get your boots on, Dean," Hudak replies, and Dean suddenly thinks that he's heard her sound cold, desperate, angry as hell and dismissive. But this is the first time he's heard her sound crushed.

She pushes up again. "What's the plan? How are we doing this? Since you can't actually walk?"

" _We're_ not doing this," Dean informs her.

"Oh, _we're_ doing this, Dean," she replies, and she chuckles humorlessly. "You're in my custody. Which means I'm legally responsible for you."

It's left-of-field enough for Dean to let his bewilderment overcome his discomfort. "In your custody? What the hell does that mean?"

"I arrested you," Hudak says. "Well, I arrested Gabe, anyway."

"You fuckin' _arrested_ him?" Dean splutters weakly. "I mean me? I mean him?"

Hudak smiles thinly. "Yeah, he was getting restless. I think he was scared of me."

"Well, maybe you reminded him of Missy," Dean spits back, with some venom.

Rolling her eyes, Hudak glances towards the other room. "We can maybe break the bedframe down, MacGyver a crutch, or a splint or something so you don't have to put all your weight on the leg." She stops suddenly, and her voice turns brittle. "The leg. You know it's infected, Dean. You know this is, it's—"

"You're right, I know what it is," Dean snaps. "And I'm still doing it. So just get me booted and spurred, splint me and point me in the right direction. I'll draw them off, and you can hike back to town and forget any of this ever happened, forget you ever met us. It's what you want after all."

Christ, he's exhausted, his body aches, his shoulders are tensed, bunched, and his guts are spasming. But the relief, the _fuckin' relief_ when she bends, picks up his boots, and kneels down next to him, is so intense he could maybe float off on it.

She lifts his good foot first, maneuvers it into its boot, loops the laces.

"Bunny ears," he says softly. "You did it the bunny ears way." _See, Sammy, here are the bunny's ears and they're so long he has to knot them up just like this so he don't trip over them…_

She doesn't look up. "That's how my brother showed me," she says. She lifts the other boot, _that_ boot, and then she does look up. "I'm going to pull the lace right out of this one," she says calmly. "And then I'm going to try to ease your foot in. But at some point you're going to have to push, because I can't grab you round the ankle and force the boot on."

It sounds difficult but it is, Dean finds out, inch by agonizing inch, as he braces against her thigh, grits his teeth, pushes, feels sweat bead his brow and tears breach his eyelids. _Sneakers_ , he thinks, _fuckin' sneakers_ , and he longs for his low-tops, maybe even for slippers, _Christ_ , even wishes for flip flops or those sandals, what are they called, the ones preachers wear with socks, _Jesus boots, that's it_.

He must black out for a few seconds because he comes round to the cool sensation of moistened cloth on his face wiping away the mess he made as he sobbed and lugied his way to momentary unconsciousness.

"It's done," Hudak soothes. "Sorry. Should have thought to use a plastic bag."

"Plastic bag?" Dean mutters, dazed and confused.

She smiles suddenly. "Years back, we all had these thigh boots, like Pretty Woman. Fuck-me boots, we called them. The only way I could slide them on was if I wore plastic bags on my feet."

"Fuck-me boots," Dean echoes her wistfully. "Please tell me you still have them."

Hudak is tapping her fingers on the seams of her pants. "Well, you'll never know, will you?"

Dean ignores her, is already advancing through his plan, knowing that he'll need help to get upright and moving. He heaves himself more upright, and jerks his head over towards the plastic box. "Is there anything in there that'll get me on my feet?"

Hudak blanks at him for a moment and then her mouth falls open. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?"

"Speed, whiz, crank, blues, uppers, bennies," Dean tells her. "Crazy medicine, Kathleen. You know exactly what I'm saying. I need to function. So. Is there anything in there that'll get me on my feet?"

She snaffles the edge of the box, drags it over, angry and aggressive as she roots about, plucks out a bottle and tosses it at him. "Dexamphetamine," she snaps. She doesn't look at him, sits, hugs her knees, and her breathing is fast, shallow, her face flushed, her knuckles white.

Dean takes a deep breath, confronts it. "I can never explain him and me to you," he says. "You'll never get it. I'm finding him. You don't have to come – fact is, I'd rather you didn't. I don't want your blood on my hands, Kathleen. It means too much to me." He leans across to the cup of water his brother parked by the mattress, unscrews the bottle cap, palms three of the small white pills, washes them down, settles back to wait for the buzz.

"Maybe I understand more than you think, Dean," Hudak says then. "Maybe I understand that you're a guy in his mid-twenties who remembers exactly when and where his kid brother said his first word, took his first steps… how old were you? Six? Seven? How can you know that stuff? Why would you even bother committing it to memory?" She rests her chin on her knees. "Besides. You need someone to carry the packs. The guns."

She doesn't break Dean's stare, and he doesn't honestly know what to do with her offer. "Look, Kathleen," he says, and he can't work out whether his words are laced with frustration or thanks. "You don't owe me anything. And you sure as hell don't know me well enough to die with me or for me."

"I know you well enough," she insists quietly. "And I'm not letting you do this by yourself."

Somehow Dean knows she doesn't mean looking for his brother. Somehow he knows what she means is that she isn't going to let him die out there alone. And for all his bravado and fighting words, he's pathetically grateful for it.

Maybe she has worked it out too, because she shrugs and her eyes are suddenly knowing. "I want to see how it ends, Dean," she murmurs.

**17\. Ramble On**

Hudak almost laughs out loud when she kneels by the bed, breathes out the word in disbelief. "Ikea?"

She ponders it: the fact that somewhere in that miserable hole decorated with human body parts and jars of teeth, there had been a dog-eared Ikea catalogue that Pa Bender thumbed through to choose this bed, and heck, maybe he kept it on his pile of Sears catalogues. And maybe there was a copy of Playboy too, that the old bastard only subscribed to for the articles, and now she thinks of it she can just see him sitting with his feet up, perusing twenty questions with George Clooney. "Christ," she mutters to herself as she shakes her head. "Maybe he even had an Ikea card."

The sonofabitch phoned Ikea and ordered a bed, trotted out his card number and security code like normal people did every day of the week, had the damn thing run down from Bloomington. And then he hauled it up here and cursed the asshat who invented flat-pack furniture when the screwholes didn't line up. So fucking mundane, so not a monster, so _human_. And Hudak can't help thinking of the canned food in the pantry, Progresso, Campbell's, Chef Boyarde. "Pa Bender went grocery shopping," she announces to the room. "Pa Bender might have been a Springsteen fan. Pa Bender complained about the weather, bitched about the President, and wanted the troops to come home. Once upon a time, Pa Bender changed diapers."

She recalls Dean Winchester's wander down memory road, muses that Pa Bender wept at his kids' births, and Jesus, maybe Pa Bender had remembered when and where they said their first words, took their first steps. Because this whole miserable nightmare had started with _people_. And she can't even think about that, can't think those monsters were human under the skin, so, "Allen key," she sidetracks softly under her breath. "All this tat is put together with Allen keys." And if Pa Bender was anything even remotely reminiscent of human, there's only one place it'll be.

She stands, crosses to the dresser, forces its reluctant top drawer open, and it seems like the final irony that Pa Bender had something as normal as a sock drawer. There it is, the tool she needs and she sets to work taking the bed apart, ending up with some fairly fairly decent lengths of soft pine and a jumble of broken bed slats for her trouble.

Dean is sitting bolt upright when she walks through the doorway. His eyes are wide and alert, pupils so large she can barely see a rim of dirty green.

"You look perky," she notes.

"That stuff I took has some serious mojo, Kathleen," Dean confirms, and he smiles, lopsided, dopey, pleased with himself. "It gives you feelings of happiness and power. So that means I feel happy and powerful. Which I haven't felt for a while now, so don't knock it."

Hudak considers his words for a minute, deciphers the subtext. "You sound like you speak from experience."

He narrows his eyes. "Yeah, well in my line of work you do whatever you have to do to keep yourself awake when the boogeyman's under the bed," he says, the words flowing faster as he stares at the wood. "But I've never made a habit of it. Anyhoo. Wood. What do we need wood for? You making me a cane or something? Think I can do without. Hey maybe there's an actual cane. A lot of these Benders must have been old, walked with canes. Have you checked the closets? Might be worth a look. Or is it for the splint? I was thinking maybe the splint should come right down the sides to the ground. Don't have to go up to the knee, the knee isn't the problem. Just the ankle. And how—"

"And chatty," Hudak remarks, as she wads up a pillow, folds it over the top of the wood and frowns as she wonders how to make it stay in place. "Tape," she decides. "We need duct tape."

Dean waves a hand and burbles on, and she lets him. "Junk drawer, kitchen. All kitchens have junk drawers. It'll be next to the sink. The pills are making me more sociable is all, it's what they do. While you're there, grab the scissors and twine. All junk drawers have scissors and twine. And safety pins. And paperclips. Get those too. We'll need them. But leave the tape measure, the thread and the mystic grip disk. We won't need those. Don't ask me how I know all that, since I never had a kitchen. I know you know because you do have a kitchen. Maybe I saw it on TV. Roseanne or something. That African-American family with the big sweaters—"

Hudak doesn't fight the smile that forms. "You mean the Cosby show," she says as she pulls open the drawer. She rolls her eyes at the fact it's just as he described it, picks out duck tape, twine, scissors, safety pins, paperclips, leaves the tape measure, the thread, and the mystic grip disk. Almost idly, she tugs at the other drawer, finds a rolling pin, plastic heart-shaped cookiecutters. Again it strikes her that somewhere in the insanity there was love and caring. She reaches for one of the shapes, holds them up. "Can you believe it? They baked Valentine cookies."

"Yeah," Dean responds, hardly drawing breath as he speaks. "Them. The Cosbys. My mom baked cookies. She let me lick the spoon and sometimes she made chocolate chip ones. So as I was saying, how are we keeping it on? The splint, I mean? Rope? Bandages? Needs to be something that won't stretch or the splint'll wear loose and that'll give me problems, so maybe we should use the chain? Then at least Bender won't be able to hump my leg when it all goes down. No, use the twine. No, the duck tape. And food. Just a few cans. Can opener. Forks. If you offer me another power bar I think I might stuff it up your ass sideways and dry."

He does pause then, to suck in oxygen and he must see her face because his brow furrows. "And yes, I know I'm monologuing, Kathleen, it's the dexy. Sorry, can't help it, you'll just have to go with it. It's driving me crazy too, and my jaws are aching already. I just, I just really need to go get my brother. Have you got all that stuff packed?"

Hudak doesn't really know if she's on a tactical go-slow because she hopes he might take a turn for the worse that stops his plan in its tracks, doesn't even know if it's worth roadblocking him anyway, with the mess that is what's left of his foot sapping the life out of him. "It's an ongoing process, Dean," she says finally. "Which means it's ongoing." She can't help marveling at the irony that his rambling would be funny if it weren't so desperately sad that any energy boost the pills are fueling is being spent on breathless, pointless, inane and nonsensical _witter_. "Look, Dean, I think maybe you need to, you know, take stock, start calming down instead of calming up, maybe say your mantra, because you're wearing yourself out and—"

"It's a fuckin' _nongoing_ process at the moment if you ask me," Dean races out. "Fuck mantras, we're burning daylight and the moon's been red these last few nights, and that's a killing moon, meaning this thing's about to hibernate for six months, okay? It'll be chowing down in a big way and it isn't snacking on my brother before it hits the sack. So let's mount up. Get the stuff in the packs. What the fuck are you doing with the wood and the pillow? Looks like a giant fuckin' Q-tip. Oh, I see. That fits under my arm, good thinking Batman. Can you strap a wodge of the tape round where my hand's supposed to go? So I have something to hold onto? And water. Need to fill up some bottles." He stops, passes a hand across his brow. " Jesus Christ. I wish, I _really_ wish, I could stop talking. I haven't talked this much since I picked Sam up at Stanford. He usually does the talking, I do the ignoring, and I really need to just go get him back, because, because…"

He trails off suddenly, heaves in a breath, stares at her with a sort of exhausted sadness in his eyes, and she finds herself reaching out, laying her palm on his cheek for a moment.

"This is going to hurt, Dean," she says, soft, as she lines the slats she pillaged from the bed next to his leg, and starts pulling off a long strip of duct tape. "And I'm really sorry."

"You really think they baked cookies?" Dean says, and there's a note of hysteria in his voice now. "My mom baked cookies, chocolate chip ones, did I tell you that already? She let me stir in the chocolate chips, she let me lick the spoon, and sometimes she made pie, and I think that's why I like pie so much, and—"

He stops abruptly as she starts, even though she is being as gentle as she can be, before he starts in again. "Fuck! _Fuck!_ Be careful! Don't lift it like that, what the fuck are you… Kathleen! Be careful with that, _Jesus_ —"

Hudak pauses, takes a second to rubs away the butterflies that are making her feel nauseous. "I have to lift the leg to get the tape underneath—"

"But it's killing me," he gasps. "Christ, I need a fuckin' epidural… drugs, some drugs. A shot, morphine. A drink, anything, fuckin' _anything_ , this is worse than childbirth."

He kicks out weakly, and Hudak chides, "You'll make it worse," as she keeps at the task, winding tape around the makeshift splint, ignoring the way blood splotches start to seep up through the clean dressing.

Dean is unimpressed and baleful. " _More_? Is that really necessary? _Ow_. The poker and the chain, we'll need those, _fuck-fuck-fuck_ , and we should take the trap too, you never know. It's iron, we can throw it at him, and stop, _stop_ , is there anything else here that's iron?"

He stops as she takes a time-out, dips her head down into her palm, and blows out air.

"Why are you holding your head?" he continues then, accusingly. "I told you I can't help talking so much, it's a side-effect, it isn't my fault. My mouth's hurting, my throat too. I'd stop if I could." His pitch rises as she reaches down again. "No more. It's done, you're _done_ … if you got a headache check the first aid box, there it is, look, just pop a pill for it, there's plenty of the damn things, and we should bring some. Vicodin. Just in case. And the morphine, because Christ on the cross, I need it, you fuckin' _butcher_ —"

Hudak sighs, "but morphine means show tunes," sits back on her heels, studies the taped-up leg. "Best I can do. I taped it up real good, under your boot too."

"I could tell you were taping it up real good."

Dean sounds bright, cheerful, but when Hudak glances up at him, he looks somehow _less_ than he did slumped on the mattress earlier. He looks fragile, gray face strained and drawn. He looks like a kid up way past his bedtime, or maybe more like a sick man one step ahead of the grim reaper.

"It's an awesome splint, Kathleen," he enthuses, "and it won't need any remedial work at all, I can guarantee it, because you are never going near my leg again as long as I fuckin' live. And show tunes, yeah! You should hear my Maria. West Side fuckin' Story totally rocks. Jets, Sharks. But that new crap sucks ass. Lee's Miserables? Keep it. Best—"

"Les Miserables," Hudak corrects faintly as she leans across him and reaches into the box. "Jesus, this must be what it's like to have kids," she considers under her breath as she squints at a bottle. "Aspirin. Thank you, God."

"—musicals are the old ones," Dean keeps going. "Singin' in the Rain. Guys and Dolls. Brando! Luck be a fuckin' Lady Tonight. Jesus, we must've watched a ton of that stuff when we were kids…"

And it all starts to go faint, it starts to go blurry, and the world tips sideways. Hudak's eyes swim, and her vision tunnels until all she can see is a pinprick of light, and she tries to suck in oxygen past the pressure on her throat.

The last thing she remembers is wondering how the hell Bender got past the salt.

The thing is a noisy eater, Sam thinks. "It eats like Dean," he whispers to Bobby, who's equally transfixed by the rending, ripping, sucking, slurping, chewing sounds coming from the corner.

The old man snorts, then, "Listen, Sam, the moon… was it still red last night?"

"I don't know," Sam murmurs. "We had the shutters closed. Maybe… I caught a glimpse when it pulled me out the window. Maybe it was red." He swallows hard. "Bobby, does a killing moon really send these things into hibernation?"

"That's the lore," the old man answers. "And it hasn't been eating like that since I got here."

"Feeding frenzy…" Sam breathes out. "We don't have much time, do we?" It snarls at that, and Sam can just make it out, cocking its head, listening. _Listening to us_? he wonders frantically.

It pushes up abruptly, and Sam feels Bobby lock rigid next to him, hears the tiny choked sound Bobby makes at the back of his throat. The thing is almost as tall as the pit it has them trapped in, and it looks down at them where they huddle, its red eyes glowing like Terminator eyes when they don't have their skin on. Sam suddenly realizes he knows damn well why people piss themselves in terror. Confined space, no weapons. This thing is going to kill them. Maybe not today, but soon. It'll kill Bobby first and he'll sit and watch, and shake, and dribble in horror because he's defenseless. And then he'll sit here and do exactly the same while it gouges chunks out of him a day later.

It takes a step towards them and they shrink back simultaneously. And it reaches up with spindly arms, graceful and balletic, and eye-piercing sunshine floods in, makes them blink with its sting. It bounds fluidly out of the pit in a reverse swan dive, and the light shuts off as it covers them up again.

"It's daylight," Bobby croaks after a moment of tense silence. "It usually stays here in daylight."

Sam stares up, down again, focuses ahead of him on the rough wall. "How deep do you think this pit is?" he whispers, and he shoves Bobby in the ribs when he gets nothing back. "Deep," he repeats. "How deep do you think this pit is?"

He can just see Bobby now his eyes have gotten used to the ghostly gray of the pit again, and the old man is staring up to where sunlight filters in, rubbing at his jaw. "What are you?" he says thoughtfully. "Six four, six five, pretty much?"

"Pretty much," Sam confirms. "That thing's got about four feet on me, I think." He stands, presses his back up against the wall, shuffles his heels in, and for a second he expects the phantom of his tweenage brother to loom up, pencil in hand, to mark the wall before breaking out their dad's tape measure and pronouncing him four foot two. How many motel rooms bear the evidence of Sam Winchester's gangling limbs and growing pains? _Eight foot fuckin' nine, Sammy. Dad's got me wearing your hand-me-downs. It's fuckin' wrong…_

Sam shakes himself back to awareness, cranes his neck. "Got to be another six feet or so," he says, and he narrows his eyes. "It pushed the cover up out of the way pretty easily, so it can't be fixed in place. If we could just get up there, try pushing at it… how much do you weigh?"

Bobby grunts. "Two sixty, but it's—"

"Two sixty?" Sam yelps. "God, Bobby, what—"

"As I was saying, it's one-hundred percent muscle," Bobby continues, and his voice takes on an amused tone. "Isn't it, kid?"

Sam rolls his eyes. "Definitely." He squints upwards. "If you can give me a hitch, maybe I can get up on your shoulders or something, and then if you bounce from the knees—"

"Bounce from the knees?" Bobby says witheringly. "With you sitting on my shoulders?"

"No, standing on your shoulders," Sam corrects, stepping back from the wall. "You know, like the Flying Wallendas. I'll have to reach though. We'll have to stand right up next to the wall…"

"You'll still come up short," Bobby judges.

Sam ignores the old man's despondency. "We have to try something." He glances at the ground, drops down on all-fours, starts patting around, scanning the soil as best he can in the dim light.

"What are you doing?" Bobby queries.

"We need something to push at the cover," Sam shoots back. "What the hell is this?" It's heavy, round, and he rolls it back towards Bobby. "Could be useful. A weapon." He touches cloth then, pulls at something. It follows, a dragging, heavy, limp, dead sensation. _Too heavy_. "Dammit." He crabs in the other direction, finds something lighter, can feel the smooth hardness through the rags. "Sorry, pal," he mutters as he feels his way up. He grips it tight, briefly marvels that it's so narrow, that he can get his hand around it. He pulls, pulls harder, hears a sick snap-crackle-pop as he forces the joint.

"It's a rutabaga," Bobby says from his spot over by the wall. "I was bowling it at the skulls for a while there, lost it in the dark though."

It takes Sam a few seconds to work out what the old man is talking about. _The round thing_. "Oh yeah," he says as he scoots back, brandishing his prize.

Bobby stares. "I can't believe you just did that," he comments. "Jesus. Everything I've seen and done for the last thirty years and that's one of the sickest things I ever saw."

"What?" Sam says, bewildered. "Christ, Bobby, it's just a femur. I need something to bat up against the cover with."

Bobby sucks in breath. "You ripped out that guy's thighbone."

"But he's dead, Bobby. He doesn't need his thighbone. And it's not as if there's any meat left on it." Sam shoves the bone up under Bobby's nose. "Look. Just some gristle on the end there."

"Jesus, Sam."

Hudak comes round lying on something soft. _Mom, I don't wanna go to school…_ She cracks her eyes, stares up. Scarred wooden beams. _Please be a rustic lodge with full room service at an exclusive spa in Aspen…_

Initials dancing their way across her line of vision. _Fucking Benders_.

She lifts her head and he's gone, like she knew he would be. And she squeezes her eyes hard closed against the sting of tears. _Jesus, Dean. How did he get in?_ "It's over," she sighs out. "Finally. I can go home…" But there's no relief, no respite, only regret.

Hudak pushes up on her shoulders, reaches for her throat, gets her hand about a foot off the mattress. "What the hell?" she murmurs as she stares at her wrist, at the bracelet linking it to the fender. It dawns on her them and she huffs. "My own cuffs. How the hell am I supposed to…" It's right there, carefully placed on her belly, a small cardboard carton. "Paperclips. We'll need them," she spits. "You devious bastard."

She grabs the box, shakes out a couple, straightens one, inserts it in the lock and jiggles it about. "Yeah well," she mutters. "Bobby showed me." She hears the click, smiles in triumph. "How do you like them apples, Winchester."

She pushes to her feet, glances about her. Note on the table, untidy scrawl, the ink blurred and blotchy in places.

_Kathleen, it's for the best. Bender won't follow you. Took the poker, the chain and the flaregun. Left you the gun and the salt rounds. Some silver ones in the pistol. The crutch works. Get out while it's daylight. Thanks for everything. Go live life. Dean Winchester._

"As if," she snaps as she bends to ram the pistol into her pack. She cracks the shotgun, loads up two. "Water…" She sees the pile of kitchen drawer booty on the table, stuffs it all in the bag. The filthy trap is languishing by a chair. "Ugliest doorstop in history," she murmurs. "Well. You never know." She hefts it all up, makes for the door, steps cautiously into the light.

It's quiet, but there are birds singing. A good sign, but she was a girl scout after all, so she crosses back to the burlap sack, half empty now, starts filling her pockets with salt. She wriggles out of her pack, roots out a couple of pair of socks, fills them with salt and knots them. "I'm ready," she announces to the room. "Maybe not willing or able, but I'm ready."

"Stand still," Sam scrapes out as he tries to keep his balance.

"I'm trying," Bobby growls up from beneath him. "You aren't exactly a lightweight."

"Can you bounce?" Sam asks him.

"Bounce?!"

It comes out like the vilest cussword ever, but Sam persists. "Yeah. Bounce from the knees. Like we discussed…" He spares a glance down, sees that Bobby is glowering up at him, arms braced on the wall, legs apart and firm.

"Like we discussed my ass," Bobby spits back at him. "You're going on a fuckin' diet, kid."

Sam looks back up, stretches once more, dances a brief jig on the old man's shoulders before he overbalances and crashes to the ground. Winded, he stays there for a moment while Bobby twists and eases himself down onto his butt.

"You're fat," the old man grouses, rubbing at his back.

 _Dean said that_ , Sam thinks as he stares up at the thin slivers of light that mark the trapdoor. "Dean isn't getting out of this if we don't get out of here, Bobby," he says dully. "He needs a hospital. Kathleen isn't going to be able to get him out of here by herself. He can't walk." He rolls over, groans, pushes up and crawls over, slumps to the right.

"Dean's a tough customer," Bobby says after a moment. "If anyone can—"

"Not this time," Sam cuts in, and he's remembering the bleak look his brother fixed him with back in the cabin, when he told Sam to light out of there come sunup. "I think he knew it too. It was in his eyes." He picks up the discarded can, flings it away into the darkness. "Christ. If only he could walk."

Bobby _tsks_ thoughtfully. "Could she leave him, maybe? Go for help?"

"She won't leave him." Sam doesn't know why exactly he's so sure of that, but he is. He leans his head back against the dirt wall. "I think she knows too. So she won't leave him."

Bobby grates out an incoherent expletive, pushes up onto his feet and bites back a groan, leaning forward to place his hands on his knees. "Jesus. My back." He eases up gradually. "Get up. We go again."

"It's no good," Sam mutters. "We'll never reach it."

Snorting, Bobby says, "You started this, boy. Come on. Time to plow."

"What's the point, Bobby?" Sam counters. "We're never getting—"

"Your brother's the point, Sam," Bobby snaps. It's loud in the quiet, and his voice breaks. "Your brother's always been the point. Jesus."

Sam doesn't offer anything, watches and waits as Bobby shakes his head. He walks a few feet away then, into the center of the pit, doesn't look at Sam. "I buried my son," he says into the stillness. "I carried the box all by myself. He was a small kid."

He clears his throat, pauses for a beat. "You know, Sam, being a parent is real hard work. You get tired, you snap. You aren't always as patient as you should be. Maybe you bite your kid's head off when he asks you the same thing for the umpteenth time. Maybe you holler at him to go back to bed when he gets up with nightmares. Maybe you make him sit at the table and finish his damn dinner when it's gone cold. Maybe you clip him round the ear when he isn't doing what he's told. And then…" He puts his hand up to his face, over his eyes, as he goes on.

"Then one day, maybe you bury him. And you come home and you sit and stare at nothing. And what you want to do most in the world in that moment when you know it's all gone and it's never coming back, is listen to your kid, hear what he's saying, what he's asking you for the umpteenth time. Hear his voice because you can't remember what it sounds like. Maybe you want to just roll over in the bed and let him get in next to you so he can sleep, and maybe you want to make him peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches when he doesn't like what you cooked. And maybe you want to laugh at the way he stands there and backchats you when he don't do what he's told, because you can't remember the expression on his face when he did that, can't remember what he really looked like smiling, laughing. Living."

"Bobby…" Sam whispers.

"No. Let me just…" Bobby shakes his head. "Your dad turned up out of the blue with you two boys and then he just took off, didn't ask, didn't tell. Christ, I didn't have anything, no diapers, nothing kids like to eat. You know what I told you before, Sam, about the drugs. I wasn't in it for the long haul back then. Too much had happened and hunting didn't fill that void for me like it did for your dad. So I was pretty pissed off I couldn't just get on with ending it the way I wanted to. And Dean… he never said a damn word for weeks. Just looked up at me with these big saucer eyes. Saw right inside me." He snorts. "He still sees more than you think, more than he lets on. Anyhoo, you'd just sit there eating the dirt, and he'd just walk around the place. So I'd pick you up and follow him. And I got to thinking, well, all those clothes in the garage were going to waste. And toys."

"Toy soldiers," Sam says, on the memory of sitting next to his brother in the mineshaft, and Dean's own halting recollection. "Cars. Wacky races."

Bobby turns to look at Sam, chokes out, "You boys… you were my second chance. Your _brother_. He was my second chance, Sam. And like I told him last time we were up here, I'm not burying another son. So…"

"We go again," Sam picks up softly, and as he pulls his feet up under him, his boot brushes against the rutabaga. "Maybe if we throw this up there, we can dislodge the cover," he muses as he reaches for it. "At least we'll be able to see better then." He stands, measures the distance, bends and hurls the vegetable up, and it crashes into the wood.

"I think it moved…" Bobby ventures, collecting himself, scrubbing at his eyes.

Sam bends to retrieve the rutabaga, pulls his arm back again. "I wonder how the hell the damn thing thought you were going to eat a rutabaga," he grunts, as he lets it fly, hears it impact the wood again.

"That was here already," Bobby replies.

Just like that, everything screeches to a halt, like mental brakes burning rubber in Sam's brain. "It was here already?"

"Yeah, found it on day two," the old man confirms. "The thing brought canned food for me to eat. Don't know where it got them."

"Cans…" Sam stumbles through bones, rotting flesh, drops to his knees. "Cans… find me a can, Bobby…"

"Sam, what the hell? What is this? What about the cans?"

Bobby's down on his knees too, and he's pulling at his arm, and Sam shouts in the old man's face. "The cans. Find one of the cans it brought. It's important…"

He roots feverishly through bodies, heaves, rolls them out of the way, hears Bobby from miles away.

"Sam. Sam – here. Here's one…"

Sam snatches it out of Bobby's hand, shots upright, spins, holds it up close to his face in the dim light. "Spaghettios… Jesus. _Jesus…_ " He tosses it again, squats. "Rutabaga…" he mutters, and he pushes up, bends his arm to throw it only to find Bobby right up in front of him.

"What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On?" Bobby growls. "Now."

"We're in the root cellar," Sam snaps back at him. "We're in the fucking root cellar."

Bobby shakes his head. "What root cellar? You're making no sense."

"The cabin!" Sam yells. "The root cellar! Behind the cabin. Spaghettios… the can. _It's from the cabin…_ "

Hudak steps out onto the porch, feels a sudden icy chill that's at odds with the sun, sees her breath mist out, and shudders.

Bender is standing in her peripheral vision, and she slants her eyes, assesses him. He's watching her, his face impassive, but for all his bulk there's no substance. His mouth opens, his lips form words, but nothing comes out.

 _Is it only Dean who hears you then?_ Hudak wonders. _Or did that thing somehow steal your voice?_

It's tranquil, peaceful. He's non-threatening, almost friendly. It's like he's harmless.

She raises the shotgun and gut-shoots the spectre with pleasure.

The blat of gunfire echoes in from above, and Sam freezes where he is, perched on Bobby's shoulders again. "Did you hear that?"

"You bet I did… come on, boy, we go again, _now_."

Sam feels himself jerk upwards again as Bobby pushes, groaning with the weight of Sam and his rutabaga, and Sam throws the missile with all he has, finally sees the cover shift. "The door's broken… if I could just… my bone! I need my bone…"

"Hang on…" Bobby strains, reaches. "It's propped right here… just let me… got it."

He passes it up, and now it's Sam's turn to reach, and now the bone is balanced on the tips of his fingertips, and he's barely exerting any pressure on it at all. "I Can't get behind it. Bounce."

Bobby groans again. "I'm trying."

Sam detours into a different strategy. "The gunfire, it must be Kathleen." He yells her name at the top of his lungs, towards the two-inch wide gap he's managed to open up, hollers and hollers until he can taste copper and thinks he might have drawn blood deep down in his throat because he's screaming so hard.

And when the cover pushes aside and she's staring in at him, she's the most beautiful thing Sam's ever seen. "God. Kathleen. I think I love you a little bit," he says stupidly, and he feels tears spring.

"At this moment in time, Sam, I can assure you the feeling is mutual," she replies, and she's as economical and efficient as ever, slipping her duffel off her shoulders and unstrapping the flap as she speaks. "I've got a rope."

"We knew you would have," Bobby calls up. "You got any water there?"

"Incoming."

It bounces off the dirt, rolls into a corner and Bobby scrabbles about for it, gulps it down avidly. "Damn water in these old canteens is like treacle mixed with horse piss," he says feelingly, as Sam grins at him. "Christ, this is better than Jack."

Hudak pokes her head in again. "I'm going to tie this off – there's a tree stump I can use."

"Wait, Kathleen," Sam shouts, and her face bobs back into sight.

"Dean," Sam says, feeling his voice crack slightly. "How is he? His leg? Did you manage to—"

"He's fine," she says tersely. "In fact, we've managed to get him up on his hind legs and he's more mobile than you'd have thought possible, Sam. Surprisingly active, in fact. Let me just get this tied off."

"But Kathleen—"

Bobby tugs at Sam's arm. "Let's just get out of here while we can, before that thing gets back," he says. "You'll see your brother soon enough."

Thank Christ, Sam thinks, and he's already mentally building the travvy, no, _stretcher_ , he thinks, wood from the bedframe in the cabin threaded through their jacket sleeves, because they're getting his brother out of here for once and for all and it's the last time he'll ever let Dean near so much as a fucking _shrub_ , let alone a forest.

The rope drops in over the lip of the pit. Roughly a foot in, and Sam huffs in frustration, fists his hands. "Just once, can't it be fucking easy?" he mutters. "Just one time, is it so much to ask?"

"It's not long enough," Hudak calls down now. "As you can see. Hang on, I'm going to tie my jacket to it."

Bobby hollers up, "Kathleen. Keep your eyes peeled. Thing took off a while back, that isn't its usual MO in daylight."

Silence.

"Kathleen?" Sam tries.

And there's a sudden flurry of gunfire, unholy howls of rage, a cry abruptly cut off, followed by a moment that seems like an eternity until a shadow blots out the light and Sam sees her fall. He reacts without even thinking, dives, twists, spreadeagles himself at the point of impact, but the thud as her head hits the ground is sickening.

Dean meanders along, dragging his foot because sliding it along the ground keeps the pain excruciating, which he can just about manage, unlike the first few steps, when the sheer torment had him weeping in misery and self-pity before he even reached the table, had teardrops splotch the ink as he scribbled the note.

He has his poker gripped tight in his right hand, crutch tucked firmly under his left arm, slanting out at a fifteen-degree angle because _Kathleen, how fuckin' tall do you think I am? This damn thing's about a foot too long_.

He freezes when he hears distant gunfire, glances behind him uneasily. "There's no way she got out of those cuffs already," he thinks aloud. He runs through it in his mind, hunters maybe, someone off in the woods, someone who might help. It wasn't her and she's fine. _Or maybe Lee popped up, and she took a shot at him_. He works through it logically, _even if it is Lee, he won't follow her… he doesn't swing that way, so she'll be fine_. His mind touches briefly on the fact the shot can't be anything to do with the thing because it's holed up with his brother, and he shudders, jumps off that train of thought then and there.

"How many shots was that anyway?" he mutters. "Jesus, my neck hurts. My shoulders. My leg. Fuck. Rest. Quick one."

It's like he just grinds to a halt, and he eases himself down his crutch a hand at a time, until he's a shivering curled-up ball of _fuckin' agony_ on the soil, his vision foggy, his heart racing, breath whistling in and out so fast he can almost feel the air blow dry his lips to papery harshness, feel his mouth bake dry. He lies and pants and stares at nothing, until he realizes he's lying on his pack. Water. _Drugs_. Pain, in his shoulders, neck, throat. Leg, clenching, rigid, _please stop…_

Dean shifts himself forward, inch by inch, feels his arms come loose from the straps, and rolls onto his belly. He's crashing, and, "Fuck," he gasps. "Down cycle…"

His head spins. Water. Bottle. Right there. He sips it down, slow, hard to swallow, sore. "God… hurts." He fumbles tiredly in the outer pocket of the pack, Tylenol, _oh thank God_ , and he shakes three of the pulls out with trembling hands, _down the chute_.

He doesn't know if it's sixth sense _per se_. It's not a chill up his spine, or a shiver, or the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. It's not the cold, because he's furnace-hot and bathed in sweat that saturates his tee; and it's not even that he can see his breath, because he's face down. It's what's in his mind's eye right at that moment, as he sees himself sitting on a log, Sam right there next to him, just a boy and his dog, all peaceful. No family, because family doesn't mean what it once did, family isn't what it used to be, and now instead of running to his brother he wants to run as far away as he can. But right now, just him and Sam, it's _safe_. Only then reality bites, and his brother is back, crashing into the campsite, stalking up to him, fixing him with cold, blank eyes that lost the warmth they used to have somewhere along the way.

And that's what it is: the memory of boots shuffling through crunchy undergrowth, trampling all over his daydreams, and stopping right there in front of him. And it's Pavlovian, because it's expectation, resignation, fear. That's what tells him he's got company.

"Hey, Lee," Dean rasps into the dirt. "Long time no see."

**18\. Dueling Banjos**

There's this feeling of not having had a _before_ with his brother and sister that sometimes throws Gabe off his game.

He chalks it up to the knock on his head and he doesn't say anything to Missy because she's just a bitch, in a _how Carrie got even at the fuckin' Prom_ sort of way, though from what Lee tells him about Pa the old goat would have sawed off his right testicle with a plastic spoon before letting Gabe watch that crap. Gabe can't really remember much of Pa himself, the knock on the head that screwed with his noggin means his memories are fuzzy. He just gets the odd flash of glittering eyes that must be shining out of Pa's _mad-as-hell-and-I-ain't-gonna-take-it-anymore_ face, interspersed with other glimpses of the past in which Pa's eyes are dark and gentle. And those times Pa's eyes aren't like his eyes, aren't like Lee's, and sure as shit slides off a hot shovel, they aren't like Missy's.

Gabe doesn't know how the hell Lee puts up with Missy, but then Lee isn't all there sometimes himself. Missy knows it, and she keeps nagging at Lee to take the red happy pills, but Gabe knows Lee isn't doing it. Which is fine as far as he's concerned, since it means more for him and he loves the floating, content, satisfied, _untroubled_ feeling he gets when he takes them. It's the only thing keeping him sane, he muses sometimes. Or maybe keeping him less _insane_ , in spite of the Missy's attempts to drive him psycho-loony-nutjob mad.

Truth be told, Gabe doesn't know how he puts up with Missy either, and that's the thing – because when he pays it any mind, that whole feeling of not having had a _before_ kicks in, and it means he has no memory of ever having put up with Missy. _Ever_. It's because she's a fuckin' bitch, he tells himself. It's because he hit his head, head injuries are a fuckin' douche and his made him blank her out; and sometimes he thinks wouldn't it be awesome to just bang her on the head, maybe Lee too, so they'd all stand there blank, and decide they didn't really know each other before going their separate ways. Gabe thinks he could too, thinks he could get by just fine without them. Sometimes he pictures Lee bleating away at him about how he shouldn't be out there by himself, and he swaggers and smart-mouths, _dude, I'm twenty-six_ , and he's the alpha-dog in his imagination, the big cahuna, a young man with an important purpose… and where the fuck that came from is just out of reach, but Gabe knows someone once told him that.

And he could make an honest living if he lit out by himself. He's good with his hands, he just knows he is, his gut tells him that even if his brain is mush and there's no _before_. He stares at them, neat hands, capable hands, strong hands, and he gets this feeling like he's fixed things. And then one day Lee throws him the gun, and he finds himself stripping it down automatically, cleaning it, oiling it, and then another time Missy says something about him being good at what they do. And Jesus, Gabe doesn't ever want to be good at what they do. It gives him chills, makes him think of his Pa leering right up in his face, laying it out for him, how they hunt people and have done for generations. And he knows he has hunted, sees it sometimes, and after that when he looks at his hands he knows he has used them to rip, and tear, and destroy.

But he isn't hunting people in his daydreams and nightmares, he's hunting _things that should not be_. Which he guesses makes him even sicker than his Pa, sicker than Lee and Missy and that other one he never really sees properly, the one who maybe upped and left. Because it is sick, what they do. But then sometimes when he looks at his hands, he thinks maybe he has used them to care, used them to pin diapers, used them to spoon feed, used them to ruffle hair, used them to tie shoelaces the bunny ears way, used them to button up warm winter jackets, used them to hold someone's hand, used them to make someone better, used them to wipe away tears and snot, used them to soothe fevered brows, used them to clean up cuts, scrapes and worse. When he thinks of _worse_ , he feels a thrill of horror. Worse things he doesn't _ever_ want to happen. Happen to who? He doesn't have a clue. It gives him a sick feeling of dread, combined with a shy glow of happiness that his hands have done good things too. Well, maybe, he thinks. He hopes. Doesn't know if he really _believes_ , though.

One day he steels himself to have it out with Lee, because that's what brothers do – they talk, they confide, they _trust_ , and he remembers so many earnest late-night conversations, just him and his brother, _chick-flick moments_ , talking about school, girls, helping with homework, dozing off in front of cartoons, whacked out movies about vampire dogs and giant man-eating rabbits, Okla-fuckin-homa. And that don't make a lick of sense, and the really queird thing is that Gabe doesn't just _think_ that, he actually hears a voice saying it in his head. It's a voice he knows but doesn't know, and it makes the fog in his brain even murkier because the voice and those memories all mean there _was_ a before, because the voice can't be from the future, can it? But it's the _wrong_ before, because Lee and Missy aren't in it, although sometimes Gabe scrunches his eyes tight shut and hopes that maybe it's the right before, and that when he opens his eyes again he'll be back there.

So one day he says to Lee, "We don't have a before, and I feel like I don't know you and that you're not really my brother."

And it changes everything, because Lee sits there smiling, and his smile stays fixed to his round, cheerful face, and in that instant Gabe realizes that Lee has real bad teeth but he doesn't, and that doesn't make sense either.

Lee keeps smiling all the time he's burying his fists in Gabe, kicking him and pressing his face into the mud and leaves, all the time he's pulling at Gabe's pants and saying that he's a _purty boy with a smart mouth on him who needs teachin' a fuckin' lesson_ and that Lee's the one to do it. Gabe tries to talk Lee out of it, and Jesus, he begs, and he twists his head around to try to catch Lee's eye. And Lee's still smiling, and Gabe thinks Lee might even still be smiling when he sinks his teeth into the back of Gabe's neck and forces himself inside Gabe.

 _Brothers don't do that_.

And suddenly Gabe is running, he's a kid again, chasing something, _someone_ , chasing, reaching out but never catching.

Lee rolls onto his back and goes to sleep after, and Gabe fumbles up his pants, his hands shaking so bad he can't button them all the way. He doesn't cry, even though it hurts and he thinks he might be bleeding. He doesn't cry even though he wants to, because he's a man, not a kid, and because there's a horrible familiarity about it, and he thinks maybe Lee did it before, when Gabe was still hurt and high on red happy pills after the wolf attack, though he can't be sure.

He pulls a blanket up over Lee because Lee didn't bother tidying himself away, and because it helps him to cover it up, helps him put it out of his mind and think that maybe it never happened, helps him force it back, brick it up. Missy is passing the time flicking stones at the mules with her catapult, and Gabe tells her he's going to clean up down at the river. She looks at him cross-eyed, but he doesn't care. He walks, walks away because he can't run, he hurts inside and he feels dizzy and sick, and his bad leg is sore where Lee put his knee in back of it.

Gabe walks past the river and he keeps walking. His heart flip-flops and grieves in his chest because this _leaving_ , this leaving his _brother_ , his _family_ , is killing him. But still he walks until it starts to get dark, and he can hear shouting and he's terrified, and that's when he does start wiping tears away because he thought he made it but it turns out he didn't, and some part of him is pathetically grateful that his brother cared enough to come looking for him and find him, because it must mean that he matters. So he just sinks to the ground and sits, and Sam trots out of the trees, wagging his tail and glad to see him.

And there comes Lee now, looming up so his shadow falls right over him. "Time to get back to camp now, boy," Lee says, and his voice is kind, warm, but Gabe can't help it, he feels this despair, this hopelessness, this feeling of _no before_ , of _wrong_ , of _confusion_.

Lee squats down and tells him it's all okay. "You hit your head is all," he reassures. "You ain't right in the head any more just like I ain't sometimes, and don't that make us two peas in a pod, and the bestest of buddies?"

And it turns out that there was another brother, because Lee says so, and Lee tells Gabe what a sonofabitch he was, a real mean bastard, and that Gabe's his favorite brother. There was another brother but Lee loves _him_ best, and so does Missy.

So for a minute Gabe rummages feverishly through his mind, and he can see himself throwing stuff every which way, like he's in someone's house, some old house where he feels safe, and he's searching through piles of stuff, old books, curse boxes, jars of teeth, no, _not_ teeth, jars of herbs, odd twisty bits of bark, snake skins, charms, _spellwork_ , only he's really in his own head searching for his other brother, because he has this feeling, these butterflies, this sudden pretty red flower of hope that blossoms in his heart, that the other brother is _significant_. And Lee's voice drifts in, bitching about how his other brother left, and then Gabe gets this feeling like maybe he does remember that, remembers being left.

Lee puts his arm around Gabe then, tells him how it's all going be just fine and dandy, about how they're a family, the three musketeers, and they're all in this together and he's never going to leave Gabe like the other brother did. "But there's times when ole Lee just gets this mad red mist in his eyes," Lee cautions. "Like when you mouth off, and then Lee has to step up and be the man of the house and keep you in line. And Lee hates having to do it but them's the breaks when you're the boss, Gabe, ain't that what Pa always used to say?" He blows out a rueful sigh, shakes his head. "Hurts me to do it, boy, but I do it because I care."

There's still something not right about it, so even as Gabe leans gratefully into Lee, even as he wants to stammer out his thanks, his relief that he _matters_ , his flesh crawls and his guts twist so miserably he thinks he might be sick. But at least it means he has his family and he's so fuckin' grateful he shows Lee by taking his Bowie and carving all of their initials on a tree as they walk back to the campsite. He goes to carve the other brother's name too, but he can't remember what it is. When he asks, Lee tells him it's a J for Jared, but it doesn't ring any bells and Gabe thinks Lee might be lying because even though he doesn't remember the other brother's name he knows damn well it wasn't Jared. So he doesn't carve it on there and he doesn't call Lee out on it either, because he's too cowardly, too worried about the _red mist_.

From then on, when Lee beats up on Gabe, he just keeps reminding himself that Lee's his brother and that it's the red mist, and he needs to _keep it fuckin' buttoned when he's outmanned, because it's like Tourette's_ , whatever the hell that is. And he lies there afterwards and sometimes he runs the blade of his Bowie along his arm, just testing, like. And he wonders about the other brother, wonders if he might be out there, might be looking for him, wonders if his eyes might be gentle and dark like Pa's are when he makes nice in Gabe's memory.

It makes it hurt less, even if he sometimes thinks what a _fuckin' girl_ he is, sitting there waiting for someone to ride in and rescue him.

It all flashes through Dean's brain in a tenth of a second, the time it takes Lee to pick him up, shake him so hard his brain feels like it comes loose from its moorings, and slam him back down onto the ground.

"Hey, Gabe," Lee drawls out, leisurely, lazy. "Hey boy… I'm gonna whup you good, boy…"

"I see you're corporeal," Dean manages. He feels a dull sort of triumph at the fact the dimwitted bastard won't even know what the word means, winces as it turns out that Bender's pig ignorance doesn't stop him from taking full advantage of being corporeal as he flips Dean over so he's face down. "Can you even get it up, Lee?" Dean taunts as he spits dirt and leaf matter, maybe even a bug, and isn't it ironic that he really is genuinely curious about it, thinks maybe it'll answer that question he's often pondered about just how the hell Angel managed to bang Buffy if he didn't have any circulation.

There's no response, so, "Jesus, Lee, you're man of few words dead, aren't you?" Dean dares. "How about some pillow talk?" He twists his head, dares a look, sees Lee flickering there, feels the air crackling, thinks maybe it's working, knows he's so fuckin' frightened he might even have another heart attack. "Though I guess you always were a man of action…"

He can feel ice fingers on the skin of his hips and then he does hear Lee, a scream of rage. And then it's still and Dean pushes up on his elbows, flops himself over onto his back laughing like a fuckin' hyena, a _fuckin' totally insane_ hyena, as he slowly, clumsily, pulls up his pants over the chain he has wrapped over his shorts, low down, under, between and around.

Lee flickers back into phase a few feet away as Dean buttons his jeans.

"Iron," Dean smirks. "You weren't expecting that were you, you fuckin' douche. I call it my full metal jacket." He can feel the buzz as the drugs start to take hold, feel his heart hop, skip and jump that bit faster, feels soaring euphoria, feels like he can do anything, even as his mind peaks and then hits the downslope, flitting through worry, anxiety, agitation, along the way. _Mountain goats_ , he's suddenly thinking. It's like those fuckin' mountain goats that spend all day racing at each other and clanging their horns together, the crash resounding and echoing for miles, as his sheer exhilaration butts up against a sudden feeling of persecution and a _really fuckin' embarrassing_ desire to dissolve in tears. Just what's called for when you get ready to rumble with your rapi—nope, _not_ that. Nemesis, he decides, and he snorts because it's so Stargate he almost expects Lee's eyes to glow yellow.

He rises painfully up onto his knees, grabs his poker in one hand and his giant Q-tip in the other and heaves himself up, tucking his good leg under him and pushing hard, letting out a barely stifled yelp as his weight briefly rests on the splint.

"Gonna teach you a fuckin' lesson, Gabe, real hard this time, whup you good, you little—"

"Whatfuckin'ever…" Dean parries, pulling his leg under him. "And my name isn't Gabe, asswipe." Upright he reels, leans up against a tree, tries to catch his breath, wipes his face and stares out through a headrush that has the woods pinwheel around him, grow tiny and multiply, before dashing up to tag him and run away. It's like he's peering at it all through one of those funny tube things, _kaleidoscope_ , and it takes a few moments for it to settle down. All the while Lee berates him from a few feet away. It drones out of the jerkoff in a monotone, and Dean sniggers childishly because it's Lee's bendigo impression.

"Take it like a man purty boy, ole Lee's gonna teach you a lesson Gabe, stick it to you good, little—"

"What's your fuckin' point, Lee?" Dean crows as he tightens his grip on his poker, twirling it like a drum majorette in a Fourth of July parade as the spirit ventures closer, its lips pulled back in a snarl of silent rage. He waves the poker in its face. "Bite me," he snaps, and he feels an unwelcome curdling sensation in his gut as he remembers the times Lee did just that, remembers his own fingertips tracing over the indentation of teeth marks at the back of his neck, on his shoulders. The sudden reminder of the piercing sting of being chewed on, nipped, sampled, tasted, like he was nameless, faceless _meat_ , is bitter humiliation, shame, defilement and degradation, and Dean feels himself slipping back there, feels tears scald his eyes.

"Hey, Gabe, you scared yet boy, you ready for ole Lee, you ready to stop messin' with my head and be a man about it, you worthless little piece of—"

"Shut the fuck up!" Dean hollers, so harsh it tears up out of his throat, scraping its nails along the sides and leaving raw, shredded flesh in its wake. He draws himself up, winces and slumps back against his tree, and Christ he's so sick of _trees_ , and his leg gripes, tingles, torments him, a screaming riff of pain. "What you did to me, you unspeakable, worthless piece of scum," he wheezes, reaches up to rub at his neck, because man, it _fuckin' hurts_ right there. "What did you think it was, Lee? What was all that crap about me bein' the best brother you ever had? _Had_ … that's a fuckin' laugh riot, isn't it?"

The spectre is fussing away there in front of Dean, and there's no weight to it even though Dean knows that if he reaches out to touch it, it will feel as solid, as bulky, as _overwhelming_ as Lee always felt. He can see Lee's fingers flexing, stretching, can see his lips moving, and he tries to blot out what he's saying, clamps his hands to his ears, can see Lee's eyes staring, leering, eating him up, and there's a split second when he wonders if he gets that exact expression when he's circling, wonders if he looked at Lucy Ross like that, wonders if he looked at Hudak like that, wonders, idiotically, if he maybe even looks at Sam like that when he's high on morphine and hitting on anything.

He hurts. He isn't getting out of this. He isn't finding his brother, and it's like the heel of Bender's hobnail boot grinding into Dean's heart, and his soul, and his nads all at once, and it makes him think that just letting the life drain out of him through his leg won't be such a bad thing after all. _She got out_ , he thinks abstractedly. The one good thing in this fubar. _She got out_.

His voice breaks, throat desert-dry, because Lee's just staring at him as he paces and mutters, dead eyes somehow alive with things he doesn't want to remember. "Why'd you do it, Lee?" he asks impulsively, swallowing down the lump in his throat. "I trusted you…"

He hates himself for sounding _fuckin' pathetic_ , for sounding like hurt feelings are the worst of it, like Lee just offended him mightily instead of pounding him until he didn't know who he was, where he was, what he wanted even, because he betrayed himself with his wretched, deplorable relief at being hunted down and welcomed back into the family with open fuckin' arms. "Was it some sort of power kick?" he chokes. "You got off your meds and thought you'd stick it to someone for a change? That poor bastard Gabe, who was too fuckin' sick and hurting too bad, and too doped on drugs to fight back? That the best you can do? Stick it to Gabe, stick it to _me_ , like Pa stuck it to you? Like Jared did? So you were sick of being the family bike, thought you'd do some fuckin' peddling of your own?"

Lee lunges at him and Dean's heart pulls up short as he waves the poker, obliterates the spirit in a flash of static. He starts walking, _shuffling_ , swipes angrily at his eyes, because he _does_ feel fuckin' hurt, because it _was_ treachery, what he did, this thing who was his brother, his only support, his only fuckin' solace in the misery of life as a Bender, with no _before_ and the feeling of _not right_ that plagued his dreams and every waking moment too. And the worse thing is that the rage swirling around inside him like a whirlpool, his fuckin' righteous anger, is fading away, leaving behind it the _loss_ , the loss of himself, that started in the moment the dog took him and finished in the moment Bender took him, finished as he froze and tried to wish himself elsewhere, somewhere, anywhere, finished every night when he slowly died inside because nobody came.

"You were my brother," he whispers. "My brother. You were my fuckin' brother, and you fuckin' betrayed me. How dare you!" His voice rises in a thin, reedy cry, as Bender flickers back into phase and keeps pace with him while he stumbles along.

"Take it like a man, Gabe, all you's good for, you gutless little runt, get your ass over here and—"

"Shut the fuck up!" Dean screams. "Leave me the fuck alone." He shakes his poker, stabs at the bastard. "I never stopped fuckin' lovin' you even when you were doing it, you sonofabitch. I never stopped hoping it'd be better. And when I ran, I was glad you found me. That's what you did to me."

It's like it hits him for the first time, and he has to stop, catch his breath, hang onto his crutch. "You made me feel ashamed of myself," he mutters. "You made me feel worthless, made me feel fuckin' helpless, made me think that was all my life was ever going to be… you took my life, and my power, and my control, and you had no fuckin' right, Lee. No right. I didn't do anything to you, I didn't even fight you… and you took my body, you took my mind, and you took my fuckin' family from me, took my brother, you prick, made him something _less_ , turned someone I love into a fuckin' _threat_ …" He can hear his voice rise again, to frantic, distressed. "And you fuckin' _hurt_ me, you sick bastard. You _hurt me_ …"

He's still staring at Bender, and now he sees a flicker on the apparition's face, something that passes through Bender's expression, his eyes.

"Oh, are you telling me you thought it was good for me too, Lee?" Dean rages. "Is that what you think, that I _liked_ you doing that? Did you like it, when Pa did it? When Jared did it? You hurt me. You fuckin' _hurt_ me, and I didn't want it, and I told you that and I asked you to stop, I begged and I hollered for you to stop." Dean cocks his head. "Did you put all that together and come up with yes, Lee? Is that how it was for you? And you just never clued into the way you had to beat me senseless so you could do your thing?"

The spirit's face crumples, and now Dean's fury starts to tornado around his head, churns through the Kansan cornfields, picks up houses, cows, a crate of chickens, two old guys in a rowboat, old ladies in rocking chairs, wicked witches on broomsticks. "Don't you feel remorse, you bastard," he snarls, as the black smoky funnel snakes around his brain and sweeps up all his hurt and terror with it. "Don't you feel sorry. I don't want you looking to me for absolution. I'm not in the business of making you feel better about what you did. I'm here to end you." He swings wildly, and the overwhelming feeling as the poker slips through numb, nerveless fingers and bounces out of reach is _of. Fuckin'. Course_.

And Bender is on him, has him by the hair, because his chain-link chastity belt might be keeping his virtue intact this time, but the rest of Dean is fair game, and he yells out as his crutch is tossed away, as blinding agony scorches up his leg and smokes out of his ears, and he's careering through the air. He crashes down onto his belly, and then he's hooked up by corporeal ghost boots, rolled over, grabbed and lifted by a twisted handful of his tee, shaken till his teeth feel like they might shatter in his mouth and his cry of pain turns into the jiggling stop-start _woo-woo-woo_ the injuns warble out in all those John Ford westerns.

He's slammed back down into the dirt then, and Lee's smiling, a Joker smile, like his cheeks have been slashed up to his eyes, and he might be long dead but his eyes are alive, aglow. He's walking a circle around Dean, looking him up and down, greedy, and Dean thinks if the bastard licks his lips he's going to lose it right then and there, because he's already rigid with terror. But still there's a voice in his head, and it's familiar, and it's strong, and it's _trust_ , and he pushes up on his elbows, hisses out in pain. "I haven't got time for this. I'm finding my brother and you can't—"

But Lee can, and does, and Dean screams out one of those movie screams that sends flocks of birds flapping up from the treetops at the pressure of the boot on his leg, can hear this weird feeding-time-at-the-zoo jabbering, yelping, fuckin' _yodeling_ , for crying out loud, that's coming from him as he sobs for mercy. And then, out of nowhere, he hears a voice. His heart leaps, and the tiny part of himself he has on lockdown, safe from the pain and the fear, peeks out from between its fingers, looks this way and that, and now his racket has died down he can hear his voice mumbling in the same monotone the thing had used, "Bobby-Bobby-Bobby…"

 _Shut the fuck up!_ resounds again, and Dean feels his brow furrow, because he can't work out why Bobby would be mad at him. He tries to crane his neck to look in the direction of the voice but it's stiff, and his head feels heavier than it ever has, his mouth drier. He knows now why animals chew off their own paws in traps, knows that if he could bend himself in half he'd be ripping at his own flesh with his teeth, because a ragged stump would be like a walk in the park compared to the pain of Lee's boot on there. "Bobby," he whispers, but he still can't see the old man.

And then he sinks back down because this, _now_ , is the absence of hope, as the thing lopes into the clearing, yakking away in that well-loved voice, like everything Dean held dear hasn't already been corrupted up the wazoo. And it comes back, because maybe he really had forgotten, that Bobby is long gone, dead, that maybe nothing left of him because of the killing moon. Dean howls out his grief and the thing howls along with him, a beat behind, using Dean's own voice, because it's a quick study. And then the spectre is grabbing Dean by the wrist, jerking him up into a sitting position, the world whirling and tilting around him like a fairground ride.

"Beg me, boy," Lee growls, and Dean can see the vicious delight and greed in his eyes. "Beg for mercy, Gabe, just like you always did, beg your brother for mercy, yeller little bastard, take it like a man, beg me, boy…"

Dean stares up at the apparition, and then over to the thing, where it's doing some sort of frenzied hornpipe a couple of yards behind Lee, bopping about in a way that suddenly reminds Dean of Sam and itching powder, and suddenly he doesn't feel afraid any more, suddenly he doesn't care, because it's done, over.

He looks up at Lee, and he can barely get the words out from his raw vocal cords. "Please, Lee," he whispers, and Lee leans in closer, his eyes sparking now, intent. And Dean doesn't even flinch because he's beyond flinching now. "Go fuck yourself." He literally sees the rage build, feels the air surrounding Lee throb with it, and he forces out his closing argument with all he has left, and his voice rises until he's yelling. "And for the record, you're not my brother, you dipshit hillbilly waste of skin."

As Dean streaks through the air again, reflexively wrapping his arms up around his head before he bounces maybe two, three times, he thinks it's like Lee is playing skipping stones with him. He rolls over a couple of times, comes up flush against the thing's feet, long, bony, taloned toes that could really use a fuckin' manicure, and he looks up at it and it looks down at him. He spares a second to think that if it had eyebrows it might be raising one, and that's all he has time to think because he's being grabbed by the ankle, _just like the fucker to pick the ruined one_ , and dragged along in the dirt. And he can see the talons keeping pace with him even through the dust, and he can see its lipless mouth forming a word and he frowns squints, and Jesus Christo, yes, yes, _yes_.

"Kin!" Dean croaks out, reaches up to it with his hands. "Kin! That's me, you fuckin' monster! Kin… help me… _kin_."

Codeword or what? Hell yes, because the thing is reaching out, grabbing onto his hands and shrieking at Bender, yowling, caterwauling at the ghost, and there's a minute when Dean is suspended between them, Gabe Bendigo at one end and Lee Bender at the other, before they both let go of him and he belly flops to the ground. He wriggles like a beached fish, winded, pain piercing his ribcage, panting for air that doesn't seem to be making it any further than the back of his throat before it decides Dean Winchester's lungs aren't such an attractive proposition after all and whistles back out between his lips.

And then, _it's quiet_ , Dean thinks through his daze. _Too quiet_.

But then, abruptly, it isn't quiet at all, because Dean is smack-bang in the middle of Muhammed fuckin' Ali versus Joe Frazier.

"Watch the fuckin' merchandise," he whispers hoarsely as he crawls out from under them, towards his pack, towards salvation. He collects his poker along the way, can't help looking back and cackling because he has a ringside seat at one of the nastiest bare-knuckle fights he's ever seen and it's like CGI, flinging, tossing, _whoah, felt that one_ , Christ, even some stamping going on, because Lee doesn't have the brains to just dematerialize. And he knows it's so fuckin' _gay_ , but he feels a frisson of excitement that they're fighting over him as he reaches for the flare gun with hands that shake so much he's in danger of lighting himself up before he even takes aim.

Dean hauls himself more upright, can't help a low moan of pain because that's all he can manage; agony takes energy he just doesn't have any more, he's spent, finished, and all that's left after this is his Desert Eagle, because if he can just end the thing, he can end his association with Lee by ending himself, and he longs for release now, longs for peace, rest. _Please God_ , he thinks, _please God, let my brother get out. Even though I don't believe in you, please help my brother get out_. His head is so woolly now he thinks that if someone came up and blew at it, it might just gently shatter into hundreds of pieces that drift off on the wind like dandelion seeds, and he can't see right, though he can see something looming up, silvery gray, three, four of them, and he takes aim at the one on the right, fires.

The flare shoots harmlessly through thin air and Dean's hand drops limply to his side as it squats there in front of him, eyes glowing into his, like it's waiting for something.

"Missed," Dean rasps. "Who'd have thunk that'd happen, huh?"

It reaches across him, picks up the flare gun, studies it for a moment and looks back at Dean.

He shrugs. "I wasn't going to use that on you, buddy, honest," he mumbles. "Why would I do that?"

It flings the gun with the kind of pitch Dean thinks might secure it a place in the baseball hall of fame if it weren't for the whole wendigo thing, then turns back to gaze at him again.

"Kin," it hisses.

"Whatthefuckever," Dean mutters, because he just wants to sleep now. "Just. No _licking_."

It gathers him up, cradles him against cold flesh stretched tight over bones, because it's never full, always needs more, pushes up onto its feet, starts running.

"Take me to your leader," Dean whispers, as he drifts off with the breeze caressing his face.

**19\. The Hole in the Ground Gang  
**

Hudak cracks her eyes briefly only to be confronted the sight of a gigantic head looming up in the half-light. "Big giant head," she slurs. "You got that job by kissing the big giant butt."

The big giant head's voice booms down at her and she closes her eyes, winces. _Incoming message from the big giant head_.

Inside her own head is… one long endless drumroll, that's what it is, like she's just about to do her famous trapeze act without a safety net, or as if some guy dressed as a Cossack is throwing flaming knives at her. Bass drums, snare drums, bongo drums, those quirky little drums they play at Irish ceilidhs… _bodhráns, that's it_ , she thinks. Irish stepdancers with those clumpy shoes, riverdancing through her head. Cowbells. "More cowbell," she whispers. "Michael Flatley is in my head."

The big giant head looms closer and its mouth opens again. "Kathleen. You hit your head."

She squints up at it. "No need to shout," she whispers.

"Kathleen. Where's Dean? You said he was up on his feet. Where is he? Does he have a weapon?"

She scowls. "Who the hell are you?"

The big giant head's eyes grow huge. "Oh man, you have to be kidding me. Bobby. She doesn't know me—"

"Of course I know you," Hudak snaps irritably, and rolls her eyes even though she thinks it might have made them just pop out of their sockets and bounce off her face down to the ground. "And you need a haircut."

"Then who am I?" the big giant head says.

"You are number six," Hudak tells it, and she smiles, maybe even bats her eyelashes up at the head for a minute before it's time to sleep again.

"What do you think?" Sam broaches as he glances over at Bobby. "It was a pretty hard knock."

The old man shakes his head. "Hard to tell. She hit it at the back, skull's thicker there. The sides are the most fragile."

"She thought I was the big giant head," Sam says, frowning.

"There's a _the_ big giant head?" Bobby replies. "I thought she was just talking about _your_ big giant head."

"No. _The_ big giant head," Sam clarifies. "Third Rock from the Sun. Dean loved that show."

Bobby's voice is suddenly strained. "Don't talk about him in the past tense, Sam. We don't—"

"No," Sam cuts in, swift. "The TV show is past tense. Old, I mean. The TV show. Not…" He trails off. "She thought I was number six too. That's from The Prisoner. And I think she thought she was on Saturday Night Live. And I was Michael Flatley for a second there, too."

"Man of a thousand faces," Bobby snarks, voice milder now.

"We need her awake," Sam says. "If I can get her up on my shoulders she might be able to reach the rope…" He bends his knees, steeples his palms on them, rests his chin on his fingertips and stares up at the frayed end, hanging a foot or so over the lip of the cellar. And the gun, they'd heard gunfire. A weapon, so tantalizingly near, and yet so far.

"If you bounce from the knees?" Bobby retorts witheringly. "It hasn't worked so far."

"We have to keep trying," Sam decides. "We can't reach it because you can't bounce me high enough. She's lighter than me, I could definitely bounce her higher." He nods. "I'm going to wake her."

He starts pushing up, but Bobby puts a hand on his arm.

"Leave her," he says softly. "It was a hard knock and she isn't up to this right now."

"But we heard her fire the gun, it must be up there if she dropped it when—"

"Sam." Bobby is gentle still, but he's firm. "Leave her. She'll fall again, hurt herself worse. Just let her rest for now. Thing'll likely stay out now until dawn."

"Stay out until dawn hunting," Sam mutters. _Hunting my brother_ , he thinks, and he shivers. He hates this loss of hope, the miasma of thick, cloying defeat that shrouds them like a nineteen fifties smog, the inaction, the _waiting_. He stands, looks longingly up. It's getting darker out there.

"Where do you think it is?" Bobby says, and every word is sprinkled with the fragments of what he isn't saying. _Where do you think Dean is?_

Sam hazards a glance back and down, and despite his weariness, Bobby's face is all lit up with the hope that Sam's going to tell him the thing is probably off hunting hikers, that it turned right when Dean turned left. "Kathleen said Dean was up and at it, so his foot can't have been as bad as it looked," he tells the old man, and he even manages to sound confident. "They had the guns, the silver bullets. The flaregun was in my pack too. It wouldn't surprise me if he's up a tree laying in wait for it."

Bobby nods. "Kid's pretty resourceful. I doubt that thing could out-maneuver him."

 _Not at his best_ , Sam concedes inwardly. But he saw the damage from the trap, knows Dean isn't at his best, suspects he's stumbling, unseeing and scared out of his mind, through these woods while his foot steadily rots on the end of his leg and Bender pops up like a jack-in-the-box every five minutes. He swallows thickly, glances over at Hudak. She's peaceful, all the tension smoothed out of her features, and Sam wonders abstractedly if everyone looks like a kid when they sleep, if maybe Dean doesn't have the lock on it after all, because in slumber she sheds a decade just like his brother does. And then… there's something there, something on the air seeping in from above, and he cocks his head, listens intently.

"What?" Bobby says, sharply.

Sam holds up a hand. "Shhhh…"

It's just there, faint, distant, Sam is sure of it. And he listens, wills his ears off the side of his head so that they flutter up the top of the pit like butterflies and perch there, basking in the cool night air. Only that doesn't happen, because they remain firmly attached to the sides of his head and the sound is gone. "Nothing," he sighs. "It was nothing. Just hearing things that aren't there." Because, dear God in Heaven, don't let his brother still be there. Let him be long gone. _I believe in you, God_ , he says to himself, and inside his head he throws himself at the feet of one of those cold marble statues of the man upstairs, prostrates himself in submission with his nose pressed firmly on the strap of God's thong sandal, _Jesus boots_ , he can hear Dean snigger, _God wears Jesus boots, Sammy_. Please help my brother. Please get my brother out of here, Sam prays, and he clenches his fists so hard he can feel his fingernails digging little crescent moons in the skin of his palms.

"Did you tell your dad what happened to Dean?" Bobby says.

It's out of the blue, catches Sam off-guard. "Uh. No. No, I didn't," he says, as he moves to set himself down on the ground again. "It's not really my decision. Don't you think?"

Bobby huffs out. "Yeah. I guess."

"Anyway," Sam adds, and he can't help the snippish note that sneaks into his voice. "Dad never even called me back when I told him Dean was missing. Though he called you."

"Well," Bobby says carefully. "Technically I called him."

"And he picked up," Sam notes.

Nodding slowly, Bobby says, "He picked up."

Sam snorts. "I look forward to that happening one of these days when I call him."

It hangs there in the silence for a few moments until Bobby clears his throat. "I don't have an answer for you, Sam," he says. "I don't agree with some of what your dad's done over the last twenty years with you boys, but he had his reasons. There's things that you—"

"Don't know?" Sam snaps. "Things that I don't know? But that you _do_ know?"

Bobby meets his gaze. "Something like that," he says steadily. "If your dad isn't telling you, it's because that's the best way he knows to keep you boys safe."

"But if there's something, some reason he cut us loose, cut _Dean_ loose, and you know what that reason is, you could tell me," Sam persists.

Bobby still stares right at him. "It's not really my decision," he says quietly. "Don't you think?"

Sam loses the staring game, and he slumps disconsolately back against the wall. "Dad would have a meltdown if he knew what happened to Dean," he bitches. "Dean's his soldier boy. The perfect son."

Bobby doesn't rise to it. "You know that isn't true, Sam. Your dad doesn't play favorites, boy. Your brother's just less liable than you are to clash with him."

And Sam does know, he really does, and anyway it's an unsettling reminder of what he spat so bitterly at Dean in Rockford, so he puts it in his mental bottom drawer and piles a couple of blankets on it to muffle its sheer spite, and changes the subject, sort of. "Dad left Dean out there by himself."

"Well," Bobby muses. "Dean had done ten or twelve pretty hard hunts by himself before your dad upped and left, so he was—"

"Hurt," Sam cuts in. "Did he ever get hurt?" He doesn't really know why he's asking, he knows the answer – he's seen the scars. "Tell me about my brother," he rushes out before Bobby can reply. "Tell me about my brother when I wasn't there. Tell me everything."

Bobby just studies Sam for a moment, and just when Sam thinks the old man is going to say it isn't his place, Bobby shrugs. "He was pretty charged. Yeah." He nods to himself then, smiles at some memory Sam isn't party to, and Sam feels a stab of jealousy that surprises him.

"He did get hurt pretty bad, three or four times," Bobby goes on. "One time I had to drive down to the panhandle to fetch him back… harpy cut him up real bad. You remember all those marks on his ribs, left side? At Bender's?"

Sam nods mutely.

"And that scar low down on his hip? He cauterized it himself." The old man shivers. "Tough kid. The toughest."

"He shouldn't have to be," Sam snaps. "He should have had a chance. A shot at something else. He was good with his hands. _Is_ good with them. He's good with cars. And dad, dad…" He finds his hands up on his cheeks, stretching the skin, stretching out the tension, the frustration. "Dad turned him into a killer. Into John Winchester's mini-me."

Bobby gives a low chuckle, shakes his head.

"What?" Sam challenges.

"It's just funny," Bobby says. "Funny that you think your brother's so like your dad when it's you that's the carbon copy. Both of you moody bastards, butting up against each other all the damn time." He snorts. "You both wanted to run the show, that was the problem with you and your dad. Two chiefs, and your brother the injun stuck in the middle trying to hold you two apart."

Sam bristles. "Are you saying I should have stuck around and just followed orders?" _Like Dean?_ hovers on the end of the sentence, unspoken, but Sam thinks maybe Bobby can hear it even so because the old man's tone goes sharper.

"No, I'm not saying that, Sam. Look…" Bobby's tone loses its edge, becomes even, noncommittal. "Like I said. Your dad had his reasons."

Sam exhales out some of his tension. "The demon that killed mom."

"Yep," Bobby concedes. "The demon that killed your mom."

"What do you know about it?" Sam fishes, throwing the old man a quick glance.

Bobby stares resolutely ahead. "About as much as you, kid."

Sam can sense it's a dead end, can't really work out if it's natural or whether Bobby just put a roadblock in his path. He doesn't persist, changes the subject. "Did Dean miss me when I left?" he asks, though he doesn't know why he should settle on that topic.

Bobby still stares ahead of him. "Yeah," he says. "He missed you."

"You don't think I should have left," Sam offers.

The old man looks at him then, astonishment plain on his face as his eyebrows shoot up under the peak of his cap. "Of course I think you should have left," he splutters. "I wish your brother had too, Sam, believe me. I don't blame you. God knows, I wouldn't have chosen this for you boys."

"But you were mad at me for doing it," Sam points out, and he knows Bobby was, remembers his tone of disbelief when he folded Sam's letter back up, thrust it at him. _Don't ask me how you tell him you're leaving Sam. I don't have the words_.

"Not mad, kid," Bobby says wearily. "Just – I just couldn't believe you'd actually do it. Leave him." He blows out as he considers it. "You were his whole life, you know that," he goes on. "I know you had your reasons, God knows I do. Like I said, I think you were right. What kid wants this life? I'm not stupid, I saw the look on your face every time your brother got himself in trouble stepping in front of you. And you got banged up pretty bad yourself, Sam, more than once. Who needs that? A kid with your brains, you could do anything. But, like I said. I couldn't believe you'd do it… it was the _doing_ of it. Jesus. I don't know…" He rubs at his beard. "I've been in this hole for a couple of days, Sam. I'm not making much sense, I know."

"I knew I could do more," Sam murmurs, lost for a moment in the memories the old man's words evoke.

"And so did Dean, and he was proud, real proud." Bobby nudges Sam with his shoulder. "He was never mad at you for going, Sam. Fact, some part of him was relieved you were away from the life… he knew you hated it. But it broke his heart. I'm not going to lie and pretend it was all fine. He was hitting the liquor pretty hard there for a while, and he was reckless." Bobby manages a dry chuckle. "And the skirt, Jesus. How he stayed awake by day is beyond me, because he sure wasn't sleeping his nights away. Your dad threatened to castrate him one time."

Sam can sense the old man smiling in the dark. "Did he talk about me?" he says.

"When he'd done enough shots," Bobby says, rueful now. "He said that when the feds finally caught up to him and he was on Death Row, you'd be his lawyer and you'd get him off at the last minute on some technicality only you managed to think up. Said you'd be just like that TV lawyer… who was it?"

"Matlock," Sam recalls.

Bobby shakes his head. "No… Al something."

"Alan Shore."

"Ally McBeal. That was it."

"Ally McBeal?" Sam yelps.

"Yeah, that one," Bobby nods. "He'd call you too. Call after call. I heard him through the bedroom wall." He looks at Sam. "You never picked up, and you never called him back," he says meaningfully. "Touch of the John Winchesters there, Sam?"

Sam looks down. "I thought a clean break would be easier."

"Easier for who?" Bobby prods.

Sam doesn't know. Or maybe he does. But he doesn't think about it if he can help it, and he sure as hell doesn't think about it now. "It was hard for me too," he mutters. "No safety net, no security. He was all I really had, Bobby, you know me and my dad were at loggerheads all the damn time when he was actually there. But Dean… Dean was always there."

"Did you miss him?"

It's the question Sam asked in reverse, and it's a challenge, he can hear it in the old man's voice. "I would have taken him with me," he says softly. "That was the plan. I was going to ask him."

"But you didn't," Bobby knocks back.

"No. I didn't," Sam concedes. "I thought he'd say no."

Bobby makes an unidentifiable noise and Sam eyes him.

"What?"

The old man shrugs. "When he was hammered he'd get real maudlin, say he wanted to go see you but that he might just embarrass you in front of your high faluting college buddies. So…" He pauses for a second. "Maybe you didn't ask because you thought he'd say yes."

It cuts closer to the bone than Sam has admitted even to himself. "I missed him," he whispers. "I did. But… at the same time, I didn't. I wanted to be me. Not his _idea_ of me. I wanted a life outside of Dean, outside of _this_ life."

He casts a look at Bobby, senses no hostility or judgment in the old man's demeanor. So, "I'm twenty-three, Bobby," he presses on. "And this is what stretches out before me, and until when? Until I'm too slow, until I miss, until I'm outnumbered because Dean got taken out stepping in front of me. I don't want that, Bobby. I'm not like Dean. I want to live slow, die old and leave a really ugly, wrinkled corpse. Heck, I want to see twenty-four if I can. And I never, _never_ want to see my brother take the fall for me. But here I am, sucked back into this. And yeah, it's partly because of Jessica, but… Dean _needs_. So fucking much. And there isn't room for me in that need, and sometimes I think maybe I'll never be able to walk away again. And it makes me feel trapped."

"Maybe your brother feels the same way," Bobby says quietly, after a moment. "You ever thought of that? He's just a kid himself, Sam. He's trapped just as much as you, by his sense of responsibility, and his loyalty. Are you telling me you seriously think he'd _choose_ this life, _choose_ to die young and bloody?"

It pulls Sam up abruptly, because no, he never has thought of that. Never has thought Dean might yearn for the things he yearns for, for a life outside the hunt, although suddenly in his head he can hear his brother's choked-out words from before, right after the woods, _I had them too you know. Dreams…_ He's just trying to formulate a response when the voice wafts up, faint, exhausted.

"Do you mind? I'm trying to sleep over here."

Sam is already tipping forward onto his hands and knees, crawling over to her. "Do you know me? Kathleen?"

She's staring up, and the moonlight seeping in from above makes the whites of her eyes glimmer.

"Kathleen?" Sam repeats, urgent now, because he needs information. "Come on, please…"

Hudak's eyes flicker like she's coming out of a trance. "Help me sit up, Sam," she says. "And yes, of course I know you."

The relief is like a warm comfort in Sam's chest. _Answers_ , he's thinking as he threads his hands under her arms to support her. "Dean," he says. "Where is he? Is he still in the cabin?"

She shakes her head, wincing at the motion and Sam feels a shot of hope. "He got out? Kathleen, did he get out?"

Hudak groans, presses a hand to her head. "Jesus," she mutters. "Head. Hurts."

Bobby leans in. "Kathleen, you fell down here with us, or it threw you in, one or the other. Do you remember what happened up there? Can you tell us about Dean?"

She slumps forward into her palms, voice muffled. "I feel sick. I have percussion."

"Concussion," Sam supplies.

"No. _Percussion_. In my head. Drums." Hudak peers at him through her fingers. "Concussion too, maybe."

"Okay, but what about Dean?" Sam knows how damned insensitive he must sound, but he persists anyway. "I know your head hurts, but—"

"Other parts too."

Bobby leans in then, unexpectedly curt. "Kathleen. Cut the crap. Where is Dean?"

Sam's mouth drops open and when Hudak's face reappears from behind her hands, her expression mimics his.

"Out there," she says, her voice steady. "He choked me out and left me cuffed to the fireplace with a box of paperclips. He took the flaregun and the poker—"

"But how was he even walking?" Sam gapes.

"Speed," she elaborates. "There was some in the first aid kit at the cabin."

Sam knows he must be bitchfacing at her, because she hurries on, defensive now.

"There was no other way. We had to get out and he never would have gotten up otherwise. He took the pills, he was high as a kite, talking a blue streak. I strapped the leg, splinted it, scavenged some wood for a crutch." She leans to the side, winces as she digs in her pocket, waves a scrap of paper. "He wrote me a dear John letter."

Sam takes it, stands, holds it up to the shaft of light, squints at the scrawled words.

"What condition was he in?" Bobby says from behind Sam, and Hudak huffs.

"Perky. Chatty. Perky, chatty dead man walking, basically. His leg…"

Sam glances back, sees her shaking her head at Bobby.

"His leg was a mess."

"Did the thing come back?" Sam asks. "Or Bender?"

Hudak bites her lip. "Not the wendigo, but Bender was hovering around the cabin as I left. I shot him full of rock salt and _phhttt_. I heard you shouting… and then that thing came out of nowhere, I didn't even have time to aim at it." Her tone is astonishment, disbelief. "You were right behind the cabin all along. Jesus… who writes this stuff?"

Sam rolls his eyes, looks up at the opening above. "How tall are you?"

"Five five," she tells him, and she sounds doubtful as she adds, "And please don't tell me you're planning to toss me up there."

"We've been trying to get up there," Bobby confirms wearily. "Maybe if we can get you up on Sam's shoulders, you can make a grab for the rope."

Hudak peers up herself, to where the moonlight is glowing overhead. "The moon," she murmurs. "It's still red."

Bobby glances up at Sam, back at her. "It means we don't have much time," he says, and her head shoots around, her hand flying up to the back of her skull as she yelps.

"Christ…" She breathes deep for a minute. "Who's next, Bobby?" she asks. "Has it finished with the others?"

Bobby clears his throat. "We, uh, _think_ it might have finished with them," he says quietly.

"You're next," she breathes.

"I'm next," he confirms. "But it's dark, so it might not be back now till sunup. Gives us some time."

"Help me up," she says, reaching up a hand, and Sam heaves her up onto her feet, steadies her as she rocks.

"I'm ready," she says, and she smiles weakly.

And then the weird thing is that Sam is snatched away, wrestled to the ground, and he can see her falling, see Bobby catching her, has no clue what the hell is happening to him, only that he's being spun, tossed, crashed up against the walls, along to the accompaniment of shouts and cries from afar. And then he's pinned by a vise-like grip at his throat, and he remembers in that split second that the wendigo moved house, moved house because it was lonely and because its roommate didn't like the neighborhood, didn't like the _iron_ , because he's staring into pig eyes, penetrating eyes, doughy folds of flesh. Up this close he could swear Lee is sweating, and he wonders if ghosts actually can or if it might be suspended animation sweat, the glisten of sweat that was slicking Bender's skin when Sam was pummeling him back then, when he was sinking the knife in and feeling it grind through vertebrae, twisting it to make damned sure there was no coming back. _No coming back_ … how fucking ironic is that, Sam thinks, as his vision begins to speckle wildly, like the floaters he counts on the screen behind his eyelids every night as he drifts off all escaped and took over the world, because they're floating everywhere now.

And then, abruptly, his knees buckle and he crumples down on to his butt, sucking in oxygen. Bender is gone and Bobby is on his knees in front of Sam, big hands gripping his face.

"Sam? You with us?"

"What the hell just happened?" Sam chokes out, and then Bobby is waving a bottle of water under his nose. He takes it gratefully, gulps a mouthful as Hudak drifts into view.

"Salt," she says, and she's holding something up in front of Sam's face, swinging it from side to side.

"That's a tube sock," he rasps, reaches up to rub his neck. "God."

"A tube sock full of salt," she says, reaching in for a pinch of the white stuff and tossing it over her left shoulder. "Might as well keep the devil at bay while we're here." And she's laughing, almost maniacal, maybe even tearful. "Jesus. I'm fighting off ghosts with a tube sock of salt. If they could see me now."

Bobby pushes up, takes her arm, guides her over to the opposite wall and sits her down, and then he's back. "Her pockets are full of salt too," he says, admiringly. "Woman thinks of everything. Might be enough for a perimeter line if we all sit close together. Come on."

He moves to pull Sam up but Sam shakes his head. "Nope, not happening. I'll crawl." He all-fours it over next to Hudak, flops down. "Just a couple of minutes," he sighs out. "Then we try for the rope. Think you can do it?"

She's leaning her head back, eyes closed, and the red light from above catches her face. Sam can see the exhaustion, the strain that tugs at her features again now she's conscious. "I can do it," she murmurs. "You'll have to bounce from the knees though."

And Sam hears Bobby's snort, and he smiles despite himself.

The air is light and cool on Dean's face and he opens his eyes and stares up at the roof of the world, sees darker patches, foamy clouds scudding along in an inky sky, and the moon, huge, blood-red and blotched with darker red-wine-stain lunar plains, long dead seas. _Tranquility_ , he thinks to himself. _Tranquility. Serenity. Safe_.

The trees are sighing, rustling, whispering in the night, reaching up through the mist, touching the sky, trailing fingertip branches across the sea of clouds, and Dean can smell the damp, the earthiness of it. Reborn here, he was. And now he will die here.

He's weightless, and he has a memory of being carried through these woods before, cradled in someone's arms, pressed against skin, and he grips someone's arm. _Sam_.

But no. Too cold, this flesh; too clammy, diseased, foul, unholy. Not Sam.

But… Dean is cocooned, comforted. It doesn't speak, it doesn't feel, its humanity is long gone. But somehow it _soothes_ , and he thinks he might die in peace after all.

They cry out in unison when it drops into the pit, graceful, bending at the knees and pushing smoothly up to its full height, and for an absurd second Sam wonders if it might even raise its arms and twist to the right, then to the left, and then wave to the adoring crowds; and maybe they will all silently produce score cards, five point nine, five point eight, maybe Hudak will give it the perfect six. Only it doesn't reach up because it holds his brother in its arms, and Sam can't pull out his score card, can't move, can't even speak through his swelling, aching throat, because his brother is dead, his head lolling, his arm swinging; he's boneless, battered, bleeding, a length of gray tape trailing from his blood-soaked ankle.

Sam senses rather than sees or hears Hudak turn her face into Bobby's shoulder, and the old man folds her up against him with his arm shielding her, but Sam doesn't see that, he just knows that's how it happens. He gasps out his brother's name, but he doesn't hear himself say it or feel his lips form the word, he just knows that he does it. He can't breathe, and his heart slows to a crawl, beating so loud in his ears that it drowns out anything and everything, but he doesn't feel it stutter in his chest or boom in his ears, he just knows that it happens. His tears stream down his cheeks and past his jaw, trickle down his neck and soak into his shirt, but he doesn't feel their progress, he just knows they fall. He knows his gasp turns into sobs, cries, howls of grief, but he doesn't hear the sound of his sorrow, he just knows he makes noise. He knows all of this because this is his nightmare made real, this is something he has endured in his head time after time, this is something he has expected since the day Dean told him about the family business. And just like Sam practiced his spelling, practiced his multiplication tables, practiced his Latin, practiced his marksmanship, practiced his knife skills, he has practiced for this moment, practiced for this death. He knows exactly how he is reacting, but he won't feel it. Won't _let_ himself feel it, keeps himself removed from it, apart from it.

Something is shaking him, shaking him hard.

"Let me alone," he murmurs mechanically. "Let me alone."

Harder now, the shaking, and a face is in front of him, eyes gazing into his, desolate eyes.

"Sam, snap out of it."

 _No_. He never will, maybe he'll stay suspended in this moment forever, so he doesn't have to move forward alone.

"Sam, look at me. He's alive. Look at me."

Bobby is nose to nose with Sam, pretty much. "Sam. He's alive. He's moving, making sounds. He's _alive_."

Sam has been soaring somewhere up in the stratosphere, but he's hang-gliding in fast and hard now for a crash landing, and it's like he hits the ground running, way too fast, arms windmilling. He overshoots himself and pitches right onto his nose, but solid ground is the best feeling in the world, and Sam leans forward into a crouch, stealthy and prowling closer, ignoring Bobby's warning hiss as he stares, watches, craves a sign. And there it is: the twitch of fingers, the faintest whistle of labored breath, eyes moving rapidly under their lids.

The thing sits in its boneyard, crosslegged like a kindergartner at circle time, with Dean nestled close to its heart, and there is just no fucking way Sam will sit for that because he is damned to the ninth ring of hell if his brother is dying in a monster's embrace. He reaches out his hands, says the words firmly, clearly. "Give him to me."

It stares at him, insolent, quirks its head slightly, and it doesn't speak but Sam could swear its eyes are lasering out a clear message, right at him. _Or what?_

"He'll die," Sam tells it. "Give him to me."

And Christ, but he can see something in its eyes, like the glow is dying, fading. Something in its eyes that's like contemplation, consideration, deliberation. It's fucking _mulling_ , he realizes, weighing up what it should do, maybe even making a mental list of the pros and cons, and he sees it grip his brother fractionally tighter, protective, protecting Dean from him, and _how fucking dare_ it think he's a threat to his own brother.

It makes a low, throaty sound, the kind of sound Sam has heard tomcats make when they're squaring off against each other, a continuous, threatening, mewling growl, and the glow starts up in its eyes again.

Sam sifts through his brain for something, _anything_ that will halt this stalemate, seizes on the only thing he can think of. "Kin," he says, and he taps at his chest. "Kin."

Its neck must be freakishly long and stretchy because it seems to lunge without really moving and then its face is just inches from Sam's. For a second he's enveloped in hot, steamy air, can see down past serrated two-inch long fangs into its ridged red throat, see the taste buds on its tongue, see its uvula jiggling wildly, see its _fucking tonsils_ , because it was a man once, it had _humanity_ , it wrote down its regret, its sorrow and its contrition in its journals, and it pleaded for God's help and mercy as it succumbed to madness.

"Please," Sam whispers, and he appeals to something long dead, long corrupted. Appeals to Gabe Bender. "Please give me my brother. He's dying."

Nothing, and Bobby whispers from behind him. "Try backing away from it. See what it does."

Sam crawls backward, under the thing's measured stare.

And gently, carefully, like it's handling something precious, something delicate and brittle that might shatter at the slightest pressure, it leans forward and lays Dean down on the ground, and backs away into its corner.

Just as gently, just as carefully, Sam eases his hands under his brother's shoulders, pulls him back over to the wall beside Bobby and Hudak, keeps one eye on the thing as Bobby falls on Dean like a starving man on a steak dinner, efficiently checking his pulse, pacing a hand on his brow, crawling down to examine his foot.

Hudak eases painfully out of her shirt, rips at it with her teeth, starts tearing it into strips. "Do you think it would fetch my pack?" she asks Sam, glancing over to where it sits and observes them. "If you asked it nicely? Since you seem to have built up a rapport with it?"

Sam's not entirely sure if she's joking. "Do you think it understands?" he mutters, as he reaches for the bottle of water, leans over and starts trickling single drops into his brother's mouth.

"This is filthy," Bobby says from the other end of Dean's slumped body. "I'll have to take off the boot."

"Yeah, I think it understands," Hudak says. "When it first saw him, it damn well understood. And if it's been working with Bender it must, surely?"

Dean makes a tiny choking sound and his eyes flutter open, look up, black and bottomless, and he's looking at nothing, doesn't really see Sam as his eyes wander from right to left.

"I think he hit his head," Sam says urgently. "His pupils are blown. Doesn't that mean—"

"It could be the drugs," Hudak interjects. "He might have taken more while he was out there…" She trails off as gobbling, smacking noises start up from the corner, and she grimaces. "Is that it eating?" She looks from Sam to Bobby, back again at Sam, mouths the words, "We have to get out of here."

Sam sees the message in her eyes. _Bobby's next_. And not for one fraction of a second does he think this temporary truce of sorts means the thing won't fall on them and tear them asunder when its hunger gripes and pangs again. He appealed to this thing's dormant humanity, but he knows its basic instincts will show them no mercy. And even as he gazes into his brother's confused, drowsy eyes, his brain is racing, churning, cogs are whirring, axles are spinning, gears are grinding, pistons are firing, all towards a common end: a way to kill it when they have no weapons.

**20\. The Beast in the Cellar  
**

It's still and quiet, and whatever is cradling him in its arms now is warm and wearing a shirt, but the memory of moist, gluey, icy flesh sticking to his cheek as the landscape flew by so fast it made him feel dizzy and sick has Dean giving an involuntary shiver and swallowing hard. He wonders if he dreamed it, seizes on some distant _recent?_ memory of being held close like this, and feels his way up the shirt, patting gently at chest level, even chancing a squeeze.

"I won't ask what you're looking for, boy," Bobby rumbles.

Dean's hand freezes for a second and then it clutches even tighter at its handful of fabric, and he can feel the breath of life on his face, hear the beat of life in his ear. He turns his face into the warmth as Bobby's arms close tighter around him, and he cries out into the old man's chest, soundless shuddering cries of _what_ he doesn't know any more – pain, rage, anguish, distress, grief, desperation, joy? It's like everything he feels got left out in the rain and it all bled together like one of his kid brother's paintings, red, orange, yellow and green daubed on so thick and wet they never had the chance to dry before the bright colors ran together into a tie-dyed, mottled, rainbow mess that Uncle Bobby said was abstract expressionism, _like de Kooning, boys_ , as he taped it to the garage wall.

"I got you," Bobby murmurs. "I got you."

Dean he can feel the old man's hand at the back of his head, stroking his hair there, and he breathes easier, swallows thickly, mutters into Bobby's chest. "Where are we?"

"Root cellar, behind the cabin."

It must be a good sign that Bobby can joke, and Dean shifts his head around stiffly, wondering if Lee maybe grabbed him round the neck or something, because it still hurts there and the ache extends across his shoulders and down into his chest.

"No, really," he whispers tiredly. "Where are we?"

"Root cellar, son," Bobby says again. "Behind the cabin. Sam's here, Kathleen too. And your pet wendigo. It brought you here."

"But she got out," Dean mutters. "She got out. Didn't she?" He twists around, sees Hudak slumped against his brother, asleep. "Damn," He groans, but then he brightens as much as he can when he feels like someone had at him with a tire iron in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, before driving Killdozer over him for good measure. "Gun. In her pack. Silver bullets in it."

He feels Bobby's chin brush the top of his head as the old man nods. "Yep. Just not down here. Topside. She took the pack off to get the rope."

"Rope," Dean echoes. "So we can—"

"Rope, nope. Too far up."

Dean manages a glance up above him, sees the frayed end of the rope. He sags back against Bobby's shoulder then, and despite everything, with the monster he can see crouched in the opposite corner, with no gun, no rope, here he feels safe, even though he's way too hot one minute and chilled to the bone the next, and he can feel sweat sheeting down his back.

"Whassit doing?" he croaks, feeling himself start to shiver.

"It's just laying there," Bobby says. "It hasn't hurt me or them… it even brought me food. It just comes and goes. Lies over there in between. I guess it isn't ready to—"

Bobby stops abruptly, just leans over, reaches for something, and Dean feels a bottle being pressed to his lips. He sips gratefully, but as parched as he is he has to force it down, let it trickle down there really, as he stares up at the moon, glowing pinkish now through the half-open cellar door. He knows, knows why Bobby ground to a halt. "It's finished with the others," he whispers. "You're next." His stomach curls, wretched and desperate, and he feels sick at the thought. "Bobby…"

Bobby sniffs, and when he replies his voice is light, and it's a forced, faked lightness. "The hell I am," he says. "Soon as you're up on your feet, we're out of here."

For a minute Dean lets himself believe the lie, and he thinks maybe Bobby does too before the old man breaks the silence.

"You're pretty banged up, kid," he says. "What the hell happened up there?"

"Bender," Dean mutters, breathing deep through the shudder that wracks him at the name. "Bender happened. And then _it_. It saved me from him. Can you fuckin' believe that?" He screws up his eyes as a bolt of pain streaks up his leg, thinks he might even whimper, and he feels a gentle rocking sensation. "You're rocking me," he sighs out, and inside his head everything is swirling bubbles, like the last few inches of bathwater circling the plughole. "Fuck, Bobby. Next. _You_. You have to go… you, Sam, her. Leave me. Go. Please"

"No can do kid," Bobby says gently. "Can't reach the rope, remember? And yeah. I'm rocking you."

Sam Winchester is nothing if not comfortable. The kid is built, and that's a fact, Hudak feels like she's leaning up against one of those overstuffed leather couches that bulge out in between the buttons. He's rock solid. Four feet wide, maybe, she sure wouldn't want to run into him in a thin alley, and she wonders why they haven't just thought of using his chest as a springboard. She can see it in her mind: she runs, leaps, hits, just like those guys doing the vaulting horse at the Olympic Games, and he flexes his pecs and bounces her up to the rope.

"Bounce from the pecs," she sniggers.

"From the what?"

Well she might have known, but instead of answering him she watches the thing in slumber, curled up in a fetal position, which creeps her out intensely because it's such an unsettling reminder that this thing was birthed, red-faced and squalling, just like her, just like all of them, and it had its ass slapped and was wrapped up and handed to its mother, who held it close and rained kisses on its bald head while it gripped her pinky and gazed up at her.

"It was like us," she whispers. "It was a baby. It smiled and it cried, it grew teeth, it crawled and it toddled, it said its first words… it had a brother." For a second, she remembers what Dean told her, the snapshot memories filed in his brain, and she forces them back down because his words were so pure and this thing is corrupt, depraved, can't possibly compare, even if it was someone's brother. _Can it?_

And then Sam is poking her in the ribs. "It's not like us now," he's saying, and his voice is urgent. "Kathleen. It doesn't matter if it communicates. It isn't one of us now. And if you get the chance, you have to take it. Do you understand me? Don't look at it and see even a shred of humanity, because it's long gone. The second you stop to do that is the second when it'll rip out your throat."

She nods, slowly, because the dull ache in her skull is still there in the background of every thought. "I'll be ready," she murmurs, keeps staring over at it. "Sam… why do you suppose it hangs onto that one body?"

"Does it?" Sam squints into the darkness and frowns. "Well… maybe it's like what you were saying," he says. "It was a kid once. Maybe it had a teddy bear?"

Hudak snorts discreetly, can't help it. "Who's seeing humanity now?" she snarks. "You're saying that rotting bag of bones is this thing's lovey?"

He shrugs, throws up his hands. "Stranger things have happened."

"Yeah," she says feelingly. "Who knows, it could even be Bender."

Sam is yawning, but he freezes, mouth half open, dawning comprehension in his eyes, and he looks over at it, back at her.

She reads his expression like a book. "You don't really think it could be?"

Her eye is caught by movement then, Bobby laying Dean down on the ground, easing himself out from behind, crawling over.

"He came round for a few minutes," the old man whispers. "He was pretty confused… said Bender was up there, said that thing saved him, and then he drifted off again."

"At least he's Dean," Hudak points out. "That's something."

Sam leans forward, motions over to the sleeping beast. "Bobby, has it always hung onto that one body when it sleeps?" he says, his voice sharp with excitement.

Bobby eases himself onto his butt, follows Sam's stare over to the corner, scratches at his scruff of beard. "It's been hanging onto one of them," he muses wearily. "Can't say for sure it's been the same one, though. Why?"

"We think it might be Bender," Hudak says at his puzzled look.

"It makes sense," Sam chips in. "That thing was holed up in the mines before it woke up. It was watching them, stalking them. It knew where they were camped, it could have found Bender afterwards."

Bobby nods slowly. "And Bender couldn't be with it in the mine because of the iron."

Sam pushes up abruptly. "Enough resting. We need to try for the rope again," he whispers down at them. "Dean will die in here if we don't get him out. You fired the gun, Kathleen, we heard it. If you dropped it when that thing tackled you, it must be up there. And they're both here… we shoot this thing, we get out, and then all we need is matches and something to light this place up with, and Bender's history."

"Assuming it's his body," Hudak says, and he scowls as she takes his outstretched hand, follows him up.

Bobby's knees crack as he rises beside them. "There must be something in the cabin we can use as an accelerant," the old man whispers down at Hudak, suddenly alert, hope in his voice. "If that is his body, we can get both of these things if you can grab that rope and get out of here."

It's like the three fuckin' stooges as Dean eyes them through slitted lids, Bobby giving umpteen leg-ups, and he thinks the old bastard might be goosing Hudak a tad too enthusiastically as he plants his hand on her butt and hoists her up, _hands off, old man_. He idly watches her stretch her fingertips up, _up_ , for the rope, always two feet too high, and he wonders if he might get to see her do that leg-behind-the-ear trick if she ever does manage to grab hold of it, because there's no fuckin' way she's swinging her leg up and over without some tree-hugger-hand-knitted-yogurt yoga pose being in the equation somewhere.

_You ain't goin' nowhere, purty boy…_

It seeps into Dean's consciousness, and he grits his teeth. _I'm ignoring you, Lee_ , he thinks. _Fuck the fuck off_.

He focuses back on the escape efforts, and she's falling again, landing on top of Sam in a tangle of limbs and stifled cursing, nervous glances aimed over at the corner. They're doing it all in whispers, in frantic gestures, raised eyebrows, and pointed looks of irritation, but even so Dean is amazed they haven't woken it. He wonders for a second if it _is_ awake, if it's lying there watching them through slitted lids just like he is, and thinking _three fuckin' stooges_. And then he wonders with a hollow dread if it really is dead to the world, if it slumbers on because it's tired, because it wants to sleep for a hundred years, because the moon says it's the right time. And that means it will need to feed.

"Again…"

Up Hudak climbs for another action replay, and it's getting boring now. And even they must realize it because after they collapse in a heap again they pause for a pow-wow. Hudak leans over and rests a cool hand on Dean's brow, and he turns into the touch but keeps his eyes shut tight, and closes his ears to Lee's continuous rant too. _Not listening. Nope_.

He can feel hands on his leg, turning it, lifting it slightly, and he can't help the sound he makes, can't help shifting with the discomfort. He listens as they talk about his fever and his foot in whispers, the hushed tones people use when they're talking about fatal diseases, deciding to switch off life support, considering organ donation, debating burial or cremation, and he can just hear them above Lee yammering in his ear. _S' fuckin' boring now, Lee, boring like date night with a fuckin' nun. I'm over it. Moved on_.

Dean tenses his muscles, moans softly, but they don't hear him even though they're whispering. He hurts everywhere… except for the tip of his pinkie, maybe. Easier to pick out the bits that don't ache, smart, sting, throb, that don't send little screeching electric shocks shooting up to his brain, that don't sink vicious, needle-sharp fangs into his flesh, and he forces himself to breathe through it, _I'm the best fuckin' Dean Winchester I can be, hell yeah_.

"All I'm saying is that we need a contingency plan in case it isn't there. This thing was human once, it might remember what guns are, might have thrown it into the trees. So what if it isn't there? What then?"

 _Oh Kathleen_ , Dean thinks. So fuckin' practical, so right to the point, so cut to the chase, so enough of the crap, so tell it like it is, so many shades of awesome, so out of his fuckin' league. _Can it, Lee. You can't hurt me now_.

"Can we just keep a shred of fuckin' optimism going here? Look on the bright side, for Christ's sake…"

The voice is irritated, crackles like it's tiptoeing across broken glass, and Dean's jaded heart gives a little hop, skip and a jump, _Bobby-Bobby-Bobby_ , steady as a brick shithouse in a light breeze, dependable, reliable, never say die, never, never, _never_ say die.

"Fire will kill it. There were lamps in the cabin, kerosene lamps. If you can't see the gun, get inside, get the lamps. And matches. Is my pack still in the cabin? It'll have matches, and my lighter, outside pocket… and check the pantry – there must be liquor in there somewhere, we can use it as a Molotov."

Sam, excited, nervous, hissing out the words high and impatient, and then Kathleen cuts in.

 _Keep it down, Lee, trying to keep up here, quit your fuckin' noise_.

"Sam, you can't set that thing alight with all of you still down here, it'll smoke like crazy, you'll—"

"No it won't," Sam insists. "The one Dean burned in Colorado burned cold, there was no smoke, it just sort of – combusted into thin air."

"That's been my experience too, Sam, but look around you – that thing won't be all that burns," Bobby says, and he sounds doubtful now, looking on the dark side even, and _Christ_ , Dean thinks, the old sod can sure keep a shred of fuckin' pessimism going when he wants to.

"Kathleen is right," the old man continues. "Shooting a silver bullet straight at it is one thing, but if the gun isn't up there it isn't going to just let us climb out of here without a fight. And if we spray kerosene around down here, we might get both of them – but if all these bodies go up, we risk flamegrilling us too."

There's a brief silence, even Lee's keeping schtum for a minute, and it's so easy for Dean to sneak a hand in his hip pocket, pinch one of his little helpers between his thumb and forefinger, creep it up to his lips and push it in to sit on his tongue where it dissolves slowly. It's chalky, downright fuckin' skeevy when dry-swallowed, and he makes a mental note, _never again_.

"It's scared of fire," Sam offers. "Bobby, if you go first I can hold it off with one of the lamps while we get Dean out of here, then I can tie the rope around me and you can haul me up after I throw the lamp."

"And Bender's just going sit by and watch while you do this?"

"We can lay a salt line, I'll make sure to stay inside it… fuck it, we have to do something." Sam pushes up. "Kathleen, come on. I'm going to try throwing you. Or maybe grip you by the ankles and lift you up off my shoulders. Come on, while it's still sleeping."

"Lift me by the _ankles_?"

Dean rolls his eyes, muses silently that the thing is going to be sucking the marrow from her bones no matter what if she doesn't get her ass out of this pit, that up a crispy critter is the least of her worries. _Just get on top of my brother_ , he thinks. _Now_. And that didn't come out right.

"We have to do this now. It's going to wake at some point and then… then… who knows what it could do?"

Dean hears Sam flounder for a second on the words, thinks, _he knows it's the least of her worries too_.

"It's not human anymore, Kathleen," Sam goes on then. "Just because it hasn't hurt us up to now doesn't mean it won't, it could maybe separate us, get even more aggressive, it could, it could…" He huffs, frustrated, and Dean can decode it as easy as if Sam yelled it through a megaphone. _Bobby's next_.

"Surrender…" he slurs, because his voice is suddenly working again. "It could surrender to us, maybe. But I'm not counting on it…"

Sam's face looms up to fill Dean's vision, eyes all big and bright and shiny, and his voice shaky. "Dean. Thank God. How do you feel?"

Dean squints up. "You looking for a slap to the head, Sammy?" he whispers. "How the fuck do you think I feel?" He forces his face into a grin, sees his brother ditto the gesture, just barely. "Next time I say I need to face up to things, let's go someplace else, huh?" He shifts uncomfortably. "Help me sit up."

"Do you think that's a good idea?" Hudak interjects from next to his brother, and Bobby is right there on Sam's other side, big smile, face all lit up like the sunrise, glad to see Dean that's why, and Jesus, Dean knows that feeling. _Real glad_.

"I think it's a fuckin' excellent idea, Kathleen," he rasps, reaching his arm up to her shoulder. "Up. Sit me up. Feel better. God… _God_." He can't help a low cry as Bobby helps her pull him upright, bites down on it, grits his teeth. "Tylenol. Pocket. _Fuck_."

Sam squeezes a couple of fingers in, and Jesus, sudden panic, hands too big, too close. "Wait," Dean gasps out, batting the hand away. "I got it."

"What's that hard thing in your pants?" Sam hisses, and then he realizes what he said and backpedals furiously. "I mean. What is that? In there?"

Dean smirks, dips his fingers down there, unhooks the end of the chain and pulls it out over the waistband. "You know what they say, Sammy. If you holster your gun, shooting's more fun."

Sam's eyes widen still further, warm with understanding and compassion. Kindness that Dean wants to drown in, and he chuckles harshly, closes his eyes, covers them, covers his face, starts to shake, hears his teeth chatter.

An arm maneuvers around him, pulls him close. "It's okay, boy. It's okay," Bobby says to the top of Dean's head. "You did good."

Dean can hear his brother whispering up there.

"Did he hurt you? Dean? Did he get past the chain, did he—"

"No. It worked. It worked." And the relief, it's like balm to Dean's soul. "Said my piece, told the scum where to get off. Not my brother. Felt… good." The buzz is zipping in his veins now, loosening his tongue. "Should've been there. Smackdown. Like Fight Club. Kapow. Bamm. Like fuckin' Batman." He flaps a hand at the corner. "Then Skeletor over there shows up and fuck… like Godzilla versus Mothra. The original, not that crap remake. King Kong versus T-Rex. Good times. _Christ_." He bites down hard on his lip at the pain. "Leg hurts. Tylenol. Pocket. Not you, Sam. Her. _Lee, fuck off_."

Sam looks all around him, alert, appalled. "Here? Is he here now?"

Dean manages a grin. "Ole Lee's just laying low," he drawls. "Stay frosty."

"We have salt, we have a perimeter around us," Sam says, low and reassuring, and Dean wants to say, _don't worry about it man, Lee can't hurt me now_ , but somehow he doesn't think it'll make Sam feel better, thinks maybe the acknowledgment that soon he'll be past hurting will maybe suck the fight right out of his brother.

Bobby shakes the bottle of water in front of Dean. "Not much fresh water left. Drink it up boy, no sense carrying it with us when we leave."

Hudak is squirreling her fingers down into Dean's pocket and he leers as she frowns, wiggles them deeper, _life in the old dog yet_. "Left a bit. There. Right… _there_."

It's soft, breathy, not so soft it can't be heard though.

_There-right-there-like-that-more-Jesus-Kathleen-please-God-yes—_

"Shut up!" She turns and hollers the words at earsplitting volume, glances back at Dean, and even in the dim light he can see her face glows as red as the thing's eyes.

It stops, stares balefully from its corner, all cozy with its skeleton teddy bear hugged close, red eyes glowing, snaps it out, _shut-up-there-like-that-more-God…_

Dean can hear Bobby clearing his throat diplomatically to the left of him, as he stares at Sam and Sam stares at him, and he can see it dawn in his brother's eyes. Sam raises a critical eyebrow, and laughter bubbles up in Dean, cracked, desperate laughter, and he must be going mad, must be, as he warbles over at his pet where it sits in its corner, and cackles up at his brother, who's staring down at him like he grew another head as the thing picks up the tune.

It snarls out the words, _we're-off-to-see-the-wizard-the-wonderful-wizard-of-Oz_ , and Dean laughs up at Sam, because it's so damn funny that he has this _fuckin' abomination_ singing Judy Garland. Sam's hands come up to grip each side of Dean's face, and _wouldn't it be a fuckin' riot if I taught it to pray_ , and Dean husks it out, _now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep_. It's bouncing the words back at them as soon as they leave Dean's mouth, and it's just as hilarious as he thought it would be, just as _wrong, wrong, wrong_ , just as sick and warped, and—

"Dean. Stop. _Now_."

Dean stops, chokes back his madness. "You need to leave," he whispers. " Get out."

Sam's reply is firm. "Together, Dean. We go together."

"This is going to Hell in a handbasket," Sam says to Bobby, low so his brother can't hear him. "We need to get out now."

Bobby looks up at the rope, his face set grim and maybe hopeless, and Sam makes a decision, pushes up, heaving his brother along with him despite his weak sounds of protest. He holds Dean slumped upright and tries to keep the weight off his feet. "We do this now," he announces, and he doesn't give a flying fuck about anything at all anymore, because this is his brother. His _brother_ , dying in his arms. "Kathleen."

"But what about the—"

"Bobby, hold him upright," Sam barks, wrestling Dean over to flop him into Bobby's embrace. "He's the shield. You have a knife, look like you mean business."

"You mean—"

"Yeah, I mean. If it thinks we're going to hurt him, it might keep its distance."

The old man's face creases in concern. "Kid, I don't think—"

"We're leaving," Sam reiterates in a growl. "Where's the knife?"

The thing is surging up now and it towers above them, agitated, restless, snarling. It's starting _now_ , happening _now_ , Sam knows, and he looks Bobby right in the eye. The old man stares back, doesn't falter because he knows too, reads what Sam is saying to him in that look, loud and clear. He nods, looks away, pulls his knife from his belt and holds it a few inches from Dean's face, and Dean is so dazed he isn't even aware of it.

Sam motions Hudak closer and she curses softly under her breath as he pushes her up. She clambers onto Sam's shoulders and he reels slightly, reaching out to steady himself with one hand on the dirt wall, while he grips her ankle with the other. Her boot soles grind unforgivingly into his shoulders but still Sam wants to scream at her to _grab the fucking rope_ , jump, _anything_ , because it's a matter of split seconds before this all explodes into the shitstorm of the century, something they just aren't ever coming back from.

"Don't spend too much time looking for the gun, Kathleen," Bobby' is saying, his voice strained. "If it isn't there, go for the lamps and the matches."

Sam can see Bobby tracking the beast with his eyes as it paces. It seems to be holding a conversation with itself, seems to be working out a plan of its own, a frustrated back and forth, and Bobby shuffles back as it jumps a few feet closer, half-dragging his stumbling, confused hostage with him, having to hold Dean up fully now as his knees buckle underneath him.

All the time Sam is bouncing from the fucking knees, and he calls urgently up. "Can you reach it?"

"No, it's too—"

"Try harder!"

"It's too—"

"Try fucking harder," Sam hisses. "Reach for it! Jump if you have to, because we need the fucking gun _now_."

He digs his fingernails into the bare skin above Hudak's sock in emphasis, feels the weight of her lift off him completely, and it's all a blur then, because something is crashing into him, and it feels like a full body tackle from one of those six-foot-nine inch NFL quarterbacks. He find himself being hurled into the wall, his head bouncing off the hardpacked dirt, and he's sagging, thinking, _no, no, no, please God no_ , and now his only plan is to get to his brother and bury his face in his shoulder so Dean doesn't see what's about to go down. In the same instant, he hears Hudak flop to earth and cry out, sees a fuzzy image of her rolling, recovering, pushing up into a crouch and she's scrabbling at the ground, flinging a mixture of salt and dirt right at Sam. He closes his eyes just before it rains down, realizes what it means, _Bender_ , not the wendigo. Bender will never leave his bones, they should have expected him to drop in again, and Christ, the bastard has perfect timing and how is it that he does that?

Sam can hear Bobby calling his name as he shakes his head hard, tries to shake out the cotton fuzz. He sees a bleary image of the old man over Hudak's shoulder, and shouts, reaches out even though it feels like his hand isn't connected to his arm, because he's doing all of this reflexively; as far as he knows, not one working part of his body is getting through to his brain at all right now.

Hudak registers Sam's message finally, turns as Bobby is cuffed down to the ground, the thing roaring its triumph and hunger as the knife drops harmlessly to the soil. Dean crumples down into an untidy heap, and Hudak twists, starts to throw herself at the knife, to fight the thing off. Sam knows it, and still he grabs her arm, stops her momentum. She turns back, face white and shocked as Bobby's shouts resound around the pit, and Sam yells at her, yells to be heard above the sound of his family being laid to waste in front of him.

"We go again. I'll get Dean."

Her expression is appalled, horrified as it passes from his eyes to hers just as it had to Bobby's: _This is a sacrifice I am prepared to make. Don't stand in my way_.

"No, Sam, we have to—"

"No!" he shouts. "We need the gun, the bullets. I'll get Dean."

Sam pushes her aside, and as he crawls towards his brother he can see Bobby in his peripheral vision, where the thing is playing with him like a cat with a mouse. It picks him up, drops him, tosses him this way and that, and Sam can hear Bobby's shouts of anger, sees him pummel back, thinks maybe this is Bobby doing his damned best to play this out for as long as he can to distract it, to give them a chance to get out of there before it ends, and Sam doesn't know what he'll do if those shouts become cries for help. But really he does know, knows he'll still grab his brother, knows he'll still bully Hudak into getting back up there, knows that if a ladder suddenly appeared from nowhere, he would still use this as the diversion it is to get Dean out of here while the thing feeds.

He grabs Dean's hand, hauls him over, prays his brother can't see, can't hear, all to no avail because Dean's eyes are wide open and there is a look of growing realization on his face. He starts wriggling like a fish on a hook, shaking his head, turning it to look over to where the noise is coming from, and Sam leaps to his feet, plants his boot firmly on his brother's ragged tee, pins him there as he barks instructions at Hudak.

"Climb up. _Now_."

Sam chances a look, can see Bobby's hand is gripping a knife now and it's rising and falling, the old man is giving it all he he's got, sinking the blade into the thing's chest. It's squealing at the sting, just a sting because it isn't a silver blade, Sam thinks, _it needs to be silver, it'll hardly slow the damn thing down, and time is running out_. Sam piggy backs Hudak up, bending at the waist, and then he lets out an involuntary yelp of agony and looks down to see his brother sinking his teeth into his ankle, just above his sneaker.

"We're fucking leaving, Dean!" Sam screams down, but no they aren't, because they're tumbling in a heap again, and Sam flips backwards to avoid crushing his brother under his weight. He hears Hudak's cry as she hits the ground again, harder, and she doesn't get up this time.

The freezing cold blast of Bender erupts next to Sam, icy fingers grip him by the neck, pushing him back against the wall, lips curl gleefully away from brown-stained teeth as the apparition greedily looks him up and down. Its eyes are hungry, naked lust, and Sam thinks, _Jesus, this is how he looked at Dean_. This is how Bender frightened his brother into helplessness, this is how Bender made him feel like filth, like trash, like nothing, and Sam can feel it leaning closer, whispering in his ear, sick promises that have his balls racing back up into his abdomen and cowering somewhere behind his liver, savage threats that make his knees tremble, that disarm him, overwhelm him, just like they did Dean. And now he knows exactly how and why sheer terror had his brother taking refuge in childhood games of tag, because just for a second he's there too, racing through the dust, laughing because Dean's gaining, reaching out to tap him on the shoulder and take off in the opposite direction. He can even hear his brother's voice through all those years, hear Dean calling, and it's all phasing in and out now as Sam tries to suck oxygen past the hand squeezing his throat, and he thinks his brother might sound desperate, might even sound like he isn't calling Sam's name at all, might sound like he's calling Lee.

And suddenly Sam is sliding down the wall, hard onto his ass just like before, his legs splayed out, and he's just watching it all happen, like watching a movie. In the movie, some old guy is going at it with the monster, and it's _pretty fuckin' special, Sammy_ , and it sure as hell is, because old guy is even fighting it off with a bone. The token woman _out of your league, dude_ , is sitting there looking dazed and rubbing her head, and the bloodsoaked hero is pulling what looks like a chain out of his pants, throwing it to one side, hollering at some other guy _angry spirit_ who just beamed in from nowhere. It must be the guy who created the monster, and maybe he locked some poor sap up years ago, some guy who came to read the meter, that's how these cheap B-movies always play, and he turned him into a monster by feeding busty blond college students to him.

And now cut to the woman, and she's a tough one _Dean's right, you are Ripley_ , hell she's flinging herself on the monster, has her arm up around its throat. It flings the old guy to one side, rises up to its full height, howls in irritation as it reaches long arms back to grab at her, perched high on its back, and Sam can hear her screaming frantically, something about the soft skin and flesh of a woman tasting better than old guys. And it strikes him that the hero isn't exactly holding his own here _do something, you fucking idiot_ , because the big guy _it's Lee Bender, get with the program for Christ's sake_ is slobbering all over him, and the hero _Dean, it's Dean, snap out of it_ is staring at him over the big guy's shoulder, wide-eyed with dismay and pain. Sam looks from Dean's face to the chain, lying discarded near his leg, and it's iron, _iron_ , and fuck, it's _Bender_ , and his brother pulled the chain out of his pants to lure Bender away from _him_ , and Bender's trying to… he's trying to… and his hands are… and no, just _no_.

When Sam snaps back into himself he thinks it must be like astral projection or something, because it's violent, like someone grabbed him and pulled him out of his body, miles away, maybe up to the stars, and when it let him go he pinged back in there as if his consciousness was connected to his body with elastic. When he collides with himself, it's with the force of a jumper hitting the sidewalk, and he even wonders if he might have mentally _splatted_. In the next second he's up, has the chain, is flailing it wildly, and Bender vanishes.

"Leave it on!" Sam barks at his brother as he wraps the chain around Dean's arm. "I don't care what you see. Leave it the fuck on."

He spins, ignores Bobby's huddled body, yells at Hudak, who is still being buffeted by the thing. "Let go of it!"

He spies her tube sock discarded over by the wall. Salt circle, them in it, Hudak up top trying for the rope again. It sounds like a plan, and Sam dives on the salt-filled sock, turns back to see Hudak is still up there, hanging on tight. She's being whirled around now, with her legs trailing out behind her like Superman's cloak, and Sam can still hear her yelling at the thing, right into its long pointed ears.

And suddenly it stops spinning, stops trying to dislodge her, and it's looking down at Dean. Sam can see its eyes, its expression, the look that passes between it and his brother, and he gapes, because it's universal male for _what the fuck do I do about this screaming harpy?_ , and it holds out its hands, and Christ, is it asking Dean for _help_?

Dean darts his eyes to Sam, back to the thing, and he swallows before croaking it out faint and uncertain into the silence.

"Dude, just throw her out if she won't shut up."

And blow them if it doesn't, if it doesn't reach above it, grab Hudak by the head, or so it looks, and send her rocketing up, out into the dark.

To freedom.

To the rope.

To the _gun_.

**21\. Last Man Standing  
**

Hudak can see stars, the Pinwheel Galaxy. She's lying on the grass in the backyard, in overalls and Keds, and she can hear her brother's voice in her ear.

"Katie, that's Ursa Major, the great bear," he says, and he tells her a wondrous story about Zeus, and Callisto, and jealous Hera. "The bear never sets," he says, and then he points to the Little Dipper, "Ursa Minor," he notes, "the nymphs who cared for Zeus when he was a baby hidden on the island of Crete…"

Hudak stares up, enthralled, as he spins tales about the charioteer, the lyre, the herdsman.

But one day he never came back, her brother…

"Kathleen!"

_Katie… see there, that's the lion, and there's Apollo…_

"Kathleen!"

Riley knew about the stars but he never knew about the killing moon, Hudak suddenly thinks. Or did he? Did he find out about the killing moon here in these woods, running for his life? She wonders what would be worse, being hunted by humans or hunted by a monster, wonders then what the difference is, if any, because the Benders were as monstrous as the monster, and its humanity equal to theirs.

Her head aches worse than ever, feels wet. She puts a hand on her hair, wafts her fingers under her nose. Copper. Bleeding. She thinks she might sleep for a while, here under the stars, _it's just like camping, Katie…_

"Kathleen! Come on!"

"Shut up, Sam," she mutters, as she rolls onto her front and yomps along on her elbows to the edge of the root cellar. "What?"

Sam is goggling up at her, white-faced, for maybe ten seconds before he's suddenly swept out of her line of sight by something huge, a blur of motion she can't make out properly, and now she's staring down at Dean. He's gazing back up at her from the floor, and his mouth is open in a comical O of something that might be surprise but his eyes are huge and terrified, but then something grabs his leg and pulls him into the dark shadows off to the side, and she's staring at nothing.

There's something she should be doing but for the life of her, she can't remember what it is, so Hudak rolls over on to her back again and stargazes, while something warm trickles down her face.

"Kathleen! The gun, we need the… Jesus, _no_ —"

"Shut up, Riley," she murmurs lazily, and she lies and ponders the fact that the stars are dead long before their light goes out.

Dean is fairly sure Lee pulls him across the ground so fast his fingers leave rubber tire marks on the hard packed soil and maybe even smoke billows up. Even so, he's prepared, and when the bastard rolls him over and straddles his hips he closes his eyes, flails wildly right through the pain barrier with his chain-wrapped fist, hears the apparition crackle away into thin air.

He can hear scuffling, the noise of yelling echoing around the pit, but it's all moving too fast for him to see properly: it's flashes of flying limbs, accompanied by a soundtrack of snarling, howling, crashing, the dull thuds of something heavy impacting against a solid surface.

He calls out thinly, his voice fading even as he tries to force it out. "K'leen. Gun…" But even if she were a foot away he knows she'd have trouble hearing him, because his throat is collapsing in on itself, clenching like a fist, squeezing the words back down instead of up and out. He focuses on the shaft of moonlight six feet away, rolls himself back onto his belly, shudders and pulls back, because he's among bodies, glistening bones that sear his nose with their stink, he's in its bed, and these ravaged, chewed, gnawed remains are his brother's fate, Bobby's too.

 _Bobby…_.

Dean can see a bulkier shape a few feet to the left, slumped, still. "Bobby…" he chokes out, and he starts to crawl, pulls himself with his hands, toes his good foot into the dirt and tries to propel himself faster. He reaches out when he's arm's length away, and pats the old man's face. "Wake up," he whispers, maybe even pleads. "Bobby. Wake up… please. Wake up. Wake up."

_De. Wake up. De-De-De. Wake up._

_Dead Squaw, Nebraska. Mom-and-pop grocery store, gas station, hamburger hovel, ten prairie dogs for every fat, dim hick with chewing gum on one side of his mouth and a cigarette on the other. Pay-by-the-hour motel, usual stained wallpaper, carpet like woven vomit, mildew and worse-spotted sheets, and four, five, six little red bumps tracking up the inside of his wrist in a straight line, itching like crazy, and the bedbugs went home with full bellies last night._

_It's barely light._

_De. Wake up. Rising shy._

"Rise and shine, Sammy," Dean mutters. "It's rise and shine."

Noise, he can still hear noise, muffled faraway cries, and they bring him back. Bobby is staring at him and then past him, and his lips are moving, and Dean crawls closer, lays his hand gently on the old man's bristled cheek again. "You're okay," he whispers, and he knows he's smiling the kind of smile he reserves for suspicious desk clerks staring at counterfeit credit cards in all those skeevy motels in so many one-horse towns up the ass of nowhere. "S'good."

Bobby's lips move again and Dean leans in, listens hard to the exhale.

"Sam…"

There are more confusing noises from the other side of the pit, but the thuds and crashes have died down, and now Dean can hear panting breaths and coughing. Bobby is still glaring into his eyes, eyebrows drawn down, mad at him again, and still saying his brother's name, and why the fuck are they lying down anyway, Dean wonders irritably.

And then Bobby is further away from him all of a sudden, disappearing into the gloom. He reaches out to grab at the old man's shirt, but his fingers trail uselessly over the fabric and then Bobby's out of reach, and it's him who's being hauled away.

Gabe Bendigo hoists him up and sits him down among the bones, patting his head gently. "Kin," it growls.

It's squatting there in front of Dean and he feels his stomach lurch, because Bobby did damn good work with the knife and its chest is a massive sucking wound. Black blood bubbles out of it, slick and burnished in the pale, filmy light of dawn that just now starts glowing into this Hell from the world above. It cocks its head for a second and its eyes burn less hot, before it twists, slowly prowls over to where it left Bobby, and it walks like a panther tonight, muscles rippling. It squats down, pokes a few times at Bobby, lifts his hand and lets it flop down, and when it glances back at Dean, it seems disconsolate at the old man's lack of reaction.

Through his haze of pain, because he hurts like a mother and all the girlfriends she met up with for mom's night off at a local bar with maybe a male stripper in the mix, Dean wonders hectically if Bobby might be playing dead, but the thought skips through his conscience, on and out the other side, because he's finding it hard to focus. "Listen," he slurs, and he stops, furrows his brow, because it turns out that his brain was crocheted by some old crumbly eking out her remaining years in a twilight home for the terminally bewildered somewhere, and it can't seem to hold onto anything sensible and coherent, it's all slipping through the holes.

"I'm me." He finally reaches out, grabs a hold of that one and pulls it back in before it tumbles into the abyss along with reason, judgment, planning, and self-control. "Just me," he whispers. "I got one brother. One. Him and me is all there is. Not you. Not Lee. Got that?"

It stares back at him. "Kin," it croons fondly, and Jesus, did it wink at him?

"Me," Dean repeats. "M' brother. Thassit…"

He glances around him, into the shadows, and there he is, his kid brother, not six feet away from him, lying with his arms outflung in a prone crucifixion, while Lee Bender leans over him, dips down closer, and nuzzles his cheek.

Bender bares his teeth, _he bites, watch out_ , and his hands wander, and he trembles with anticipation. "Gonna teach you a lesson, boy," he hisses, reptilian, forked tongue, slimy.

He draws back, tenses, ready to pounce, and _get away from my brother_ , Dean screams inside his head. Toxic anger surges up inside him, ground-zero energy, a Hiroshima of rabid ferocity that blasts through his brain, whites out his vision in a fireball of utter fury, because that, right there, is the _last fuckin' straw that broke the camel's back_. His lungs fill with air and he roars out a mushroom cloud of seething, bitter rage that he hears like a sonic boom, feels like a planet-shaking shockwave, but it comes out in a hoarse, helpless, panicked whisper, because Jesus, he's _done_ with Lee, doesn't ever want to go back there. He doesn't want to press flesh with the sick sonofabitch again, doesn't want to feel Lee's lips mashing his skin, his teeth marking him, his fingertips branding him, doesn't want to be smothered by him again, _ever_ again.

The tiny, rational portion of Dean's brain, the portion up in the top right hand corner, the portion that's wearing its helmet and flakjacket and reporting into the Nightly News a safe distance from the warzone as the missiles fly, is calmly reminding him just how much he doesn't want to unwrap the end of the chain from where Sam entwined it around his wrist, even as he grips its trailing end in his teeth and laboriously twists his hand free. But it turns out that decision-making didn't fall out through the holes in his gray matter at all, it hung on manfully, gritted its teeth, swung its leg up and clambered right back in there. And Dean flops himself forward and starts crawling towards his brother, hauling himself along on his elbows.

A foot or so away he cracks the chain like Indiana Jones's bullwhip, only not so much, because really he pats his hand down on Sam's arm and fuck, _misses_ , the few inches of iron he managed to loose falling down a good foot clear of Bender as he necks away. Sam is coming round but he's dazed, blinking slowly, and he isn't fighting because maybe he isn't really there. Dean knows that feeling, and he mutters his brother's name, grips his shirt, pulls closer, finally stabs the chain links through the douche so that Bender flickers and vanishes.

Dean breathes his brother's name again, right in his ear, because he has nothing left to give now, and his mind is cloudy, nebulous. He curls up next to Sam, rests his cheek on Sam's shoulder and his chain-clad arm across Sam's chest, because it's finally time to rest.

It's like babes in the wood, Hudak muses as she peers in at them. All they need is robins fluttering around down there sprinkling them with leaves and petals, and— _Christ_.

The gun.

She scrambles to her feet, looks left, right, _no gun_. She lurches to the edge of the pit again, pulls back violently as a wave of dizzying, throbbing pain in her head threatens to pitch her back in there. She can see Sam lying flat on his back, staring up at her, but she can't see the thing and she daren't call down and draw attention to herself. She waves frenziedly at Sam, and he's blinking, frowning, lifting up his head and looking dazedly at his brother, nestled against his side.

 _Bobby_ , Hudak thinks frantically. Lamp, he said to get a lamp, fire good. Rope. _Get a fucking grip_.

She races around to the front of the cabin, slams in through the door, _lamp, on the table_. There is Sam's pack and she roots through the outside pocket for his lighter, _fuck_ , upends the duffel entirely, and smashes her hand on the device as it skids across the table. Liquor, pantry, and her eyes rake the shelves. It's up top, corked bottles, home-made moonshine if ever she saw it, and she jumps, scatters, grabs, feels her hand close around smooth glass, hears a second bottle, a third, shatter on the floor at her feet.

Her boots crunch on glass chips and she skates across them back into the kitchen, _rag_ , uncorks the bottle, feeds the end of the fabric in through the top. Her hands are shaking, she can't get the cloth in far enough, and she rips the junk drawer out of its housing, scatters the contents everywhere, _pencil, thank God_ , and she uses the tip to push the end of the rag right down inside, into the liquid. Then she wheels, hurtles through the door, long-jumps clean across the porch, yelps as her ankle twists, and lurches back round to the pit.

A split-second after he sees Hudak's white, scared face peering down at him, Sam is in his own driving seat again, and he pushes up onto his elbows, shakes his head hard.

"Dean," he mutters, and he hooks a hand under his brother's shoulder, starts heaving him over to the wall. Dean doesn't know him, starts slurring nonsense and hitting out at him, and a split second after that Sam is thinking that body armor is going on the list when they restock after this one, as he exhales a visible puff of icy vapor that tells him Bender is somewhere close by.

The force with which his back crashes against the wall again tells him Lee is engaged elsewhere, however, which means that he's in serious trouble, the kind of trouble he somehow knows a tap on the chest and the claim of _kin_ isn't bailing him out of this time. That realization rams home in a bolt of pain as the thing's claws rake through his jacket and shirt, scalpel sharp, and Sam cries out as they slice into his abdomen, the sting agonizing. He feels the wet sensation of blood start trickling down his ribs, grabs at himself just to make sure his bowels aren't spilling out all over the dirt, damn well takes a couple of seconds to say a prayer of thanks that his guts seem intact for now because evisceration might just cramp his style. He ducks as it looms up and sinks a fist into the wall where his head just was, and scoots between its legs, hoping to God it doesn't sit down, because being up close and personal with its teeth and claws is bad enough without getting intimate with its block and tackle.

"Ow! Christ!" Sam flinches, and his hand flies up to the back of his head, rubs hard, and something bounces off him onto the dirt in front of him, small, shiny, Jesus, _salvation_.

He rakes his fingers in the dirt, closes them tight over it as he flips over onto his butt, risks a look up. Hudak is staring down at him again, wide-eyed, holding a bottle, and now Lee looms over him, a foot on either side, leers down at him, lifts his boot.

Sam pulls up his legs, rolls as the boot slams down into the dirt, scrabbles around the apparition, shoots upright. "Throw it down!" he hollers. "Now!"

Hudak is leaning in as far as she can, dropping the bottle, and Sam hears it thud to the ground as a violent push sends him careering out of range. He yells out in frustration and hears her echo him from above. He drops to his knees, dives for it, _please don't be cracked_ , and suddenly he's swept up by his ankles, dangled upside down like his dad used to do when he was a kid, or was it Bobby?

He can feel the blood racing to his head, hears it rushing in his ears like the sea crashing on the shore, and the thing is swaying him gently to and fro. Sam swings like a pendulum do for a full minute, and he can see Bender closing in on his sprawled brother all the while. Dean's arm is flung out to his right, chain trailing in the dirt, too far away to repel the bastard, and Sam stutters out horror and panic as he flicks desperately at his lighter, barely touches the flame to the skin of the thing's leg, and holy mother of God, the fingertips of his other hand land on cold glass and he grabs hold, grips the bottle tight, hugs it close to his body as the beast shrieks and drops him on his head.

It bounds away, and Sam's legs timber down to earth, his feet slamming so hard into the dirt they bounce several times. And before he has time to draw breath, he's pushing up onto his elbows, his haunches, up onto tired, tremulous legs, and he's flicking on the flame again, lighting the makeshift wick.

He shouts it out at the top of his lungs. "Hey! Lee Bender!" Bender's head whips round, and this is the gamble now, this is the moment Sam finds out if he's right, as the spirit turns, grins, starts ambling towards him.

"Have a drink on me, you sack of shit," Sam snarls, and he turns, slams the bottle down among the piled up bodies.

It all explodes in bright orange flames, because Pa Bender knew how to brew up hooch like no man, and this is ten-thousand-proof Martian rocket fuel. Bender's face falls, anger fading to disappointment, and he's less distinct, his edges are softening, blurring. He dissolves into nothing as the beast looms up behind him, and throws a roundhouse punch that knocks Sam down onto the dirt again. It kicks him aside then, transfixed by the flames, reaching out its clawed hands to the smoking, popping, sparking ruins, shrilling out its fear and grief.

Sam blinks slowly, breathes slowly, because truth is he doubts he'll ever be able to do anything fast again. He can feel the blood pooling underneath the skin of his shoulders, _that'll hurt in the morning_ , rests his hand on a warm, sticky, growing patch on his shirt front. But he wills himself up onto his hands and knees, crawls towards his brother, folds his long body around and behind him, leans against the wall, gathers him up and grips him tight. Dean feels hot, he's shivering, breathing fast and shallow, but it doesn't matter now, Sam knows, because the smoke is already starting to make his chest feel tight. _This is how it ends_ , he thinks. _We go together_. And at the end of it all, it's a relief, it's how it should be, it's right and it's comforting, and it's what Sam wants.

The sound is like nothing he's heard it make before: it's the sound of reprisal, retribution, revenge, and for a second Sam marvels at the fact that after all this, his skin can still crawl.

And then it's right there, crouching, curling its maw back from dripping teeth. It's raising its fist, claws like tusks on the tips of its fingers, because it's getting even with Sam Winchester, and Sam knows that in a fraction of a second he'll be dead, his skull pierced, caved in, his brains spattered across the dirt wall he's slumped against. He says his brother's name, holds him tighter.

"Enough," Dean whispers.

And he detonates, explodes with a strength Sam doesn't believe possible, punches out and doesn't stop, driving his fist into the monster's wide-open, shredded chest, elbow deep.

Sam hears ribs snap like dry branches, and Dean freezes.

It's still looking at them, but now its eyes are dull, sad, and it speaks, its voice rasping, mournful, desolate.

_I-pray-the-Lord-my-soul-to-keep…_

It glows from within, from its chest outwards, fizzles, flares, flashes, flames blue and green around Dean's hand as it melts into nothing.

Sam's breath wheezes out in tune with his brother's, and he stares into the half-light for a long moment of silence, a silence that's golden, he thinks, _fucking golden_ , before he swallows thickly. "How did you do that?" he whispers.

His brother coughs weakly, holds up his hand, tilts it, and through the thick, dark slime coating his fingers Sam sees his ring glinting.

"S-silver," Dean slurs. "S'a bitch, Sammy… Silver's a fuckin' bitch."

And his hand falls and his head lolls on Sam's shoulder.

Hudak isn't quite sure what she just witnessed, hangs her head over the edge for several minutes, can just make out Sam's sneakers protruding from the smoky gloom.

"Rope," she says out loud into the dawn.

She's lethargic, has to force herself upright, she's wrung out, used up, and her head is exploding. She totters along, looks up at the sunrise, a new day. She can still see the moon high above, no longer blood-drenched but pinkish now, the color of baby clothes and powder rooms and strawberry ice cream, and maybe it's finally over.

The rope is tied around the tree stump where she left it yesterday-a-lifetime-ago, and she looks back at the gaping cellar, wearily tries to figure out where she can loop it, doors won't do because they're rotting.

More rope. There must be some in the cabin, because how the hell else would the Clampitts have gotten down to and up from the poor bastards they stowed in their hellhole, and as she nears the side of the porch she slows to a stop, sinks down onto the dew-soaked grass, stares dumbly at the metal hooks on the side of the cabin, the other side of the cabin, the metal hooks holding the ladder the Clampitts used to get down to and up from the poor bastards they stowed in their hellhole.

She chokes out a frantic giggle that evolves into a patented Dean Winchester drug-and-agony-induced insane cackle, and she buries her face in her hands and weeps, gulping, shoulder-heaving sobs that make her head pound even more.

Bobby comes round with a jolt, breathes in the stink of burning meat and sputters. "Jesus. What the hell?"

He stares owlishly into the pit from his vantage point, pushes up onto his hands, breathing in sharply. His eyes are watering, his chest is tight, and he hurts all over. He took a beating, a good one, and he remembers being kicked around this hole like a fuckin' football.

"Smoke," he spits out, rubbing at his stinging eyes, and ducks back down nearer the ground, where it's less thick, to take a breath. "Lamps. It worked."

He squints up, can see light through the blue-gray fumes, can hear sounds, metallic clangs and groans.

"Kathleen?" he coughs out. "Sam?"

He hears a muffled cry, sees a dim shape.

"Bobby? Bobby? Oh my God. Bobby…"

"Are the boys up there with you?" he calls out tightly.

"No… still down there. Ladder, I found a ladder. Just a second… can you see it?"

He can see Hudak's blurred figure maneuvering the ladder in, stands as it drops towards him, waves smoke away from his face. "Just about… what the hell happened? Where are they?"

"I'm throwing down a cloth, wet… wrap it around your face."

Bobby barely has time to reply before it flops down on top of his head and he spits saturated fabric, plucks it off, wipes his eyes, holds it up over his nose and mouth until his breathing eases.

Hudak is stepping off the ladder, her face half covered, and she stands up close. "They're over there, somewhere," she says, muffled by the cloth, and Bobby turns, scrunches his eyes to see through the smoke.

She puts a hand on his arm. "Bobby, wait a minute… I don't know if they're okay or not. It got pretty rough and I was up top, out cold."

Bobby ignores her, has to know even if a part of him wants to stop the world and get off so he won't ever find out he lost his family while he slept, and he's already over there falling to his knees. Hudak drops down beside him, pressing soaking wet cloth into his hands and wrapping another piece around one of them, he can't even tell which.

He feels his way up the body in front, head hanging limp, buzzcut. "Dean," he breathes, puts his lips close up to his boy's ear. "Dean."

Nothing, and he winds the cloth around, tucks the ends in, starts pulling the body forward. It flops like a ragdoll in his arms, won't come any further because arms are locked tight around it and not letting go. Bobby leans in close again, pushes Sam's hair back off his face, and his voice is soft as he looks into dark eyes, John Winchester's eyes, gleaming ice-cold, fixed on him, wary, apprehensive, suspicious.

"Sam."

No reaction.

"Sam," Bobby tries again, soothing. "It's me, Bobby. I got you boys now. Kathleen's here too. You hear me? You can let go of your brother now."

Sam nods, just barely, looses his grip, and Bobby lifts Dean up and out, lowers him flat. He squints but can't see the damage, crouches with his cheek close to lax lips, breath faint, and he heaves a sigh of relief. He feels a tap on his arm then, glances up to see that Hudak is holding up a hand, stained dark and glistening in the dawn light, and Bobby feels his guts lurch.

"Where are you hurt, Sam?" he asks gently, and then again more forcefully as Sam stares, obstinately silent.

Bobby shuffles back on protesting knees, pats the kid up and down, feels a cold, tacky, saturated patch at the front, can't see the damage, too shadowed. "Dammit," he mutters softly. "He's cut up here, or something… still too dark to see. Is there a flashlight up top?"

Hudak vanishes and he hears the ladder creak, followed by a brief silence and then more creaking as she descends. "Batteries are about dead," she warns as he clicks it on, shines it in.

"Jesus, Sam," slips out before Bobby can stop it. He gingerly raises the shirt and tee, hisses as he takes in the two parallel shallow gashes a good fifteen inches long, cutting diagonally across Sam's torso. He swallows hard, because an inch deeper and his boy would have been disemboweled.

"Is he going to be okay?"

Hudak's voice is small and frightened, and Bobby sighs. "Looks worse than it is, I think, but he's lost some blood alright and he's shocky. He isn't bleeding just now, but it'll start up again once we move him. How close is this cabin?"

"We're right behind it," Hudak says, her voice stronger. "There's a ton of first aid stuff there… we can fix this, yes? Bobby?"

Bobby sits back on his heels, rubs at the ache in his head, and he can see her more clearly now the smoke is rising up and out.

"Christ, Bobby," she starts, and the words tumble out. "You, what about you, are you okay? God, it was awful, we thought it, we thought you were, we, we—"

"You need to calm down, Kathleen," Bobby says, putting a hand on hers. "It threw me about some, knocked me out, and I hurt like a sunburned neck. But I played dead some of the time, and I'm in one piece bar the odd bump and scrape. Okay?"

Hudak nods, pulls the wet cloth away from her face, swipes at her eyes, gets a hold of herself and leans into Sam. "Sam, can you hear me?"

"Yeah," Sam breathes out finally.

"We have a ladder. We're taking Dean out of here, and then we'll be taking you up… You're going to be fine."

"'Kay… Dean?"

Bobby looks at Hudak, clears his throat, schools his tone into something approximating convinced assurance. "He's just taking a nap. He'll be fine. Both of you will be fine."

Hudak feels Dean lock tight and then spasm three-quarters of the way up the ladder, and there's a horrifying moment when she thinks she might not be able to hold on. "I don't think he's doing too well, Bobby," she grits out as she heaves.

Bobby's voice floats up, gruff and determined. "Just keep pulling, we'll deal with it up top."

"I am pulling," she manages, the sharp burn of the rope on her palms reminding her of the fact all too painfully. "Are you pushing?"

"Of course I'm damn well pushing," Bobby growls. "Christ. Just because he's dropped twenty doesn't mean he still don't weigh in. And it's dead weight."

Dean jerks again, Hudak can see the muscles of his shoulders go rigid. "I think he's seizing or something," she calls down into the dark. "Can you feel that? Spasms."

Bobby curses loudly. "Just pull him the fuck up, Kathleen. Whatever is going on with him we can't deal with it halfway up the ladder."

Hudak digs her heels in, hauls with all her might, finally gets Dean up and onto the muddy grass. She grips the rope further down, near where it's looped under his shoulders, and heaves him two or three yards away from the edge of the cellar, because she's damned if she's watching him roll over unconsciously and plummet back down there.

"How's he doing?" Bobby barks, emerging behind them. He's red-faced with exertion and he narrows his eyes as Hudak glances over at him. "And your head is bleeding."

Hudak shuffles up to Dean's shoulders, chewing her lip. "Something's not right. He seems to be in spasm or something, his muscles are locked tight, rigid." She wipes the trickle of moisture away from her temple, scowls at the red blotches on her fingertips. "Yeah, I hit it or something. It was pretty wild down there after that thing knocked you out." She leans down, studies Dean closer, and she can see that even his jaw is set tight. "Dean?"

Nothing, but suddenly his features lose their tension and visibly relax. His shoulders drop, and air puffs out between his lips. She can't shake a sense of unease as she strokes his cheek gently. "It seems to have stopped. But whatever it was, I don't like it. We need to get this moving along, jury rig a stretcher or something. Do you think Sam can walk?"

Bobby turns, looks down and then back. "No idea. He's conscious… Maybe if we strap him up good he'll stay upright. We need to get those scratches padded for this, maybe it'll stop them from coming open again. Is there anything—"

Hudak is standing up already. "There are sheets and towels in the cabin." She finds that she's swaying, though, that her head is spinning and throbbing at the same time, that nausea is welling up. She throws her hands out to balance herself because it feels like someone grabbed a hold of the grass and pulled it out from under her.

"Kathleen?"

Eyes closed, she waits for it all to settle before she starts walking carefully towards the cabin. "Just dizzy," she calls backs. "I hit my head again when it threw me out. There are painkillers in the cabin, it'll help I think."

"It threw you out?" she hears Bobby echoes her in disbelief, as she heads for the ramshackle building. "Christ. Why do I miss all the really good bits?"

Inside, another wave of vertigo has Hudak gripping onto the countertop for a few seconds, has her swallowing back bile. It passes as she inhales deeply and blows out in a whistle, and she's careful to hold her head as steady as she can as she tucks a wad of towels under her arm and retrieves the duct tape, before making her way back to where Bobby is studying Dean.

"Towels," she says wearily, as she kneels down. "You can wodge them up against the cuts and duck tape it on. I didn't think you'd want to use the bandages until we're dressing it properly."

Bobby eyes her suspiciously as he tucks the towels under his arm. "Take something for your head," he instructs her as he climbs back down. "We're it as far as getting these boys out of here, Kathleen, and it won't be easy if Sam can't walk."

She nods, stops dead because her head is about to spark and blow to kingdom come again. "Travois," she replies. "One each, maybe." She crawls back over to Dean, then a few feet further on to her discarded pack, roots out a bottle of water, gulps at it, sloshes some over her head for good measure, wake herself up maybe.

She shuffles back, lifts Dean's head up onto her thigh. He's a mess, filthy, bloody, scratched and bruised, hair scruffy with dirt, stubble patching his jaw, sweat soaking dark patches through his ragged tee. "Hey, kiddo," she says ruefully. "Not so pretty now, huh?" She rests her hand on his brow. "You got a decent fever going there."

Hudak casts a glance further down to the dried blood staining the messily wrapped foot, mentally reminds herself to climb back down and fetch his boot for him before they leave. And then, suddenly, he's spasming again, his whole body going rigid, his back arching a few inches off the grass. His eyes snap open and he's looking up at her, his expression is bewildered, confused. She takes his hand and he grips hers so tightly she winces.

"Relax," she soothes. "Breathe, in, out. Relax."

After a minute he slumps again, breath fast and shallow. Hudak forces his fingers open, reaches for the water. "Drink."

He barely cracks his lips, makes sputtering noises, eyes wide and alarmed now as the water dribbles out. He's choking as he forces it down, and he coughs, shakes his head, mutters out between set jaws. "Can't… no more."

"But you have to drink something," Hudak insists, pressing the bottle up to his mouth again.

He waves a hand feebly, pushes the bottle away before he locks up again. This time he flexes up so high that he's on his heels and his head, the rest of him clear off the ground, and all Hudak can do is crouch down and talk him through it.

Bobby rips off the last strip of tape, eases Sam back up against the wall and taps his cheek, and Sam opens bleary eyes.

"You up to this, boy?" Bobby asks him. "We hauled your brother up with a rope around him, so if you think you're likely to keel over, maybe we should take the precaution?"

Sam heaves out a sigh, looks across at the ladder. "I can do it," he mutters, reaches out a hand. "I think."

"Just put your other hand there, give your belly some support," Bobby says as he rises. "We should try to keep the cuts from opening up again if we can. You ready?"

Sam nods, maneuvers his legs underneath, pushes as Bobby pulls, groans as he comes to a halt slumped across Bobby's shoulder, panting, sweat dripping down into his eyes. "Fuck," he grinds out. "That's just… _fuck_."

Bobby pats his hand on Sam's back, rubs a circle or two there. "How're you doing, kid?" he prods softly.

Sam blinks hard, screws his eyes shut for a minute. "Getting there," he mutters. "Getting there. Walk me over."

Bobby twists around and under, drapes Sam's arm across his shoulder. "Slow and easy," he soothes, keeping his voice as patient as he can, glancing up at the sun, already bright and glowing hotly. _Tempus fugit when you're having fuckin' fun_ , he thinks venomously, and he shoots a savage look over at the smoking remains in the corner, wonders if they're all gone, thinks they damn well will be in ten minutes when he empties the kerosene lamps down here and lights it all up again just to be on the safe side. And Christ he wants out of here, wants out of this open grave, wants to stand under that sun, bask in its golden rays, and fuck skin cancer, because he's damn well going into the light and taking his boys with him no matter how much Dean pinks up and peels.

Sam's groaning again as he lifts one foot, then the other, and Bobby climbs up close behind, gets a faceful of the boy's denim-clad ass for his troubles. And then they're up top and Hudak is helping Sam ease himself up onto solid ground.

Sam looks straight over at his brother. "I heard you," he says faintly. "When you were pulling him out. What's wrong with him?"

Hudak is biting her lip, eyes darting nervously from Dean's prone body to Bobby to Sam and back to Bobby. "I think he's okay, Sam," she says carefully, widening her eyes at Bobby where Sam can't see. "I think he was just feeling it is all."

"You're sure?" Sam mutters.

"I'm sure."

Bobby climbs out, stands, starts walking stiffly towards the cabin, limping on his left side, rubbing at his back. "Be right back," he throws out over his shoulder, and once inside he navigates his way past discarded possessions, his boots crunching on smashed glass and salt crystals. He winces at the swathes of bloodsoaked cloth piled on the floor as he picks his way through it all to an open door off the kitchen. "Pantry," he murmurs. There's a rusting metal can on the floor, tucked in out of the way, and he pulls it out, squats, has to put his back into it to twist the cap off. He sniffs briefly. "Yahtzee."

They're still where Bobby left them, in various degrees of alert and aware, when he approaches the pit again. He stops at the lip, cautions, "You might want to shuffle back from the side there, Sam," as he unscrews the lid of the kerosene can.

"What is that?" Hudak asks, as Bobby upends the can, emptying it before he sets it down onto the grass, pulls a matchbook out of his back pocket, lights it up and flicks it into the depths.

"Insurance," he says dryly, and he stares down into the pit for a long few seconds as smoke wreathes up again. "It's over," he says then, palming his brow, rubbing his temples with thumb and fingers. "Jesus." He looks over at Sam, still dazed, and Hudak. "This clusterfuck is finally over."

Hudak grimaces up at him. "Dean's boot was down there," she muses. "I was going to—"

"What's wrong with him?" Sam cuts in, and he's shifting painfully over onto his hands and knees, using one hand to support himself while he clamps the other to his gut, shuffling over towards his brother. "Is he seizing? What's wrong with him?"

Bobby finds his legs are on autopilot, just like they were in the root cellar, and he's already striding over, dropping to his knees, hands planted on Dean's shoulders to restrain him as he twitches and jerks. "Don't panic, Sam, he's fine," he throws over his shoulder. "Low blood sugar can bring on seizures."

"You're sure?"

Sam's face is drawn and his eyes are bleary with pain, and worry. And Bobby tells himself that what he's about to do is the best thing he can do for the kid right here and now, tells himself that keeping Sam's hope alive is the one thing that will get him up and walking, tells himself that he can deal with his regrets and Sam's rage afterwards.

"I'm absolutely sure," he lies.

**22\. And Miles to Go  
**

Hudak has boiled-egg head, she decides. It feels like it was dunked in a pan of hot water and simmered for just long enough to kill the salmonella but make sure her brains stayed nice and soft, and then some old lady set her soft-boiled head down in front of her husband and he cracked the top of it open, and right at this moment in time he's ramming buttered toast in there and swirling it around. And when he's finished clearing out her skull, they're going to smash it into tiny pieces and scatter it around their tomatoes to keep the slugs away.

Concussion, percussion, _whatever_ , and the Vicodin she scarfed down haven't helped one iota, they're just making her feel drunk without the pleasure of a couple of glasses of red or a few fingers of the harder stuff. The sun is too bright, it sears her eyeballs after the darkness of the pit, and she feels sick to her stomach, knows she'd be technicolor-yawning in all directions if she had anything inside her to throw up. And she just has this gut feeling Bobby is lying as she busies herself applying butterfly stitches to the raw red slashes that bisect Sam Winchester, her blurry vision meaning that one minute she's seeing two, then three, then four.

"Hold still," she barks out tersely as Sam hisses air out between set lips, and _washboard_ abs twitch under her fingertips.

"Crunches," Sam says breathlessly.

Hudak glances up and away from what she's doing, closes her lips back over the tip of her tongue and its tendency to creep out the side there when she's focusing on chores like cleaning and dressing _Christ, washboard_ abs. "Say what?"

"Crunches," Sam repeats. "You asked me how I got my abs looking like a washboard. Crunches. Ow."

Note to self, Hudak's inner voice admonishes, _stop thinking aloud_. "A layer of fat across there would do you good," she blusters. "Some of the muscle looks torn, it might need proper stitching once we get to hospital. Fat can be protective, you know. Belly fat isn't all bad." And so the fuck what if she's sucking hers in just a tad.

"Your nose is bleeding," Sam replies, and she reaches up, feels a trickle. Her fingertips are beaded with blood when she examines them, and she reaches for a gauze patch, dabs it away.

Sam isn't paying attention now, his gaze is drifting across from where he's propped up against the rough log siding to where Bobby is huddled over his brother's leg. "What do you think is wrong with Dean?" he murmurs.

Hudak glances over at the old man herself, shrugs. "Bobby reckons it's low blood sugar," she offers carefully. "It can cause seizures. A friend of mine, her kid has epilepsy… low blood sugar is definitely a trigger, if she has breakthrough seizures it's always first thing in the morning before she—"

"I think he's lying," Sam says, a little testy. "I think there's more going on."

"Well, he was an army medic back in the day, wasn't he?" Hudak defends as she tapes gauze squares over the scratches. "I'm sure he's seen enough to know what he's talking about…" Her voice trails off as a wave of dizziness has her grabbing Sam's arm.

He grips her back, steadies her. "How's your head?"

"Soft boiled," she sighs. "I never thought I'd be wishing for winter in Minnesota, but that sun is just too damned bright for me. Shift forward." She winds bandages around him, rests her chin on his shoulder while she passes the roll from hand to hand, and at some point she realizes she's crying. It's just spilling out of her, slow and steady, a combination of the ache in her head, anxiety, and hopelessness; hopelessness because if they both think Bobby's lying, then maybe it's because he is.

After an oblivious few seconds, she realizes that Sam's hand has come up to cup the back of her head and he's murmuring in her ear and telling her it's going to be okay. She sits back, blows her nose noisily into her shirttail, a mess of blood-streaked discharge that has her gagging.

"Even Dean isn't that disgusting," Sam mocks.

It's weak but she smiles. "Think you can walk?"

He huffs. "I'll give it a try if it means we can get out of here faster, Doesn't feel too bad, and the strapping should help." He rolls his shoulders, groans. "Thing was flipping me round down there like a p-p-pinball." He's stammering suddenly, teeth clacking, and he grins feebly. "D-d-delayed sh-shock, I think."

Hudak eases around next to him, drapes an arm around his shoulders. "Guess that means we should share body heat," she says. "I'd offer you my shirt, but it's drenched in snot."

It's incongruous, she thinks, as they sit there looking out at the view, at the long grass and wildflowers swaying in the breeze, butterflies wafting about carried by the wind, cotton candy clouds dotting the blue sky. And she shivers because it's peaceful but there's a sadness underlying the beauty, the kind of sorrowful peace that makes her think of the civil war battlefields, Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Antietam, her dad took her and Riley to visit when they were scoping out colleges for her brother. They were undulating meadows, where the blood had long since soaked into the soil and it was tranquil, but she remembers that if you listened hard enough, the far off birdsong sounded eerily like the cries of the dying.

"It's pretty here," Sam says, and his voice is hollow.

Bobby works methodically to irrigate the puncture wounds, forcing them open and pouring antiseptic right on in there, because even if he did lie to Sam he isn't giving up on this one, never. "You fight boy," he mutters in the direction of the slack, relaxed features. "You hung on this long. Not much further to go and you'll be safe. Get you to a hospital, get you fixed up. Otherwise all these years will have been a waste of my time and effort, son. I stayed on this fuckin' merry go round for you. And you aren't turning all these years of love and worry into a waste, son. You aren't going before me."

He hears the faintest sound, looks up again, sees eyes cracked half-open, watching him, impassive at first but widening slightly as Dean's whole frame tenses.

Bobby crawls up to his head and wipes drool away. "Hang in there, boy," he murmurs. "I know it's hard, I know it's hard to breathe. I know it hurts in there, feels like your muscles are tearing right off your bones, but you have to try to relax, son, or you'll break inside. Breathe through it… come on, Dean. Breathe through it, that's a fuckin' order…"

A shadow falls over Bobby, and Hudak kneels down opposite him. "There are tranquilizers in the first aid kit," she says quietly. "Would they help?"

Bobby grimaces. "He's past the point where he can swallow them," he grates out, and he still holds on tight, hears muffled whining that has him swallowing acid back down. "We need to move out. How far do you think we are from a road?"

She rubs her head, winces at the touch. "Honestly, I have no clue. But I do remember Doc Swenson saying the Bender cabin was near Nett or Pelican Lake, so tracking south and to the west will get us to a road. Eventually. Depending which lake we're near. And assuming he wasn't lying."

Dean's hand is flapping crazily in the air and Bobby catches it, looks down into a rictus of suffering, eyes weary, clouded with pain, tearing at the outer corners. "Dean, come on," he mutters. "Don't do this, boy."

"Could we break open the capsules?" Hudak suggests. "Dissolve them in water and inject them maybe? We have syringes."

Bobby shakes his head. "Too risky. We really need to get moving, get him out of here. Both of them." He glances back over his shoulder to Sam, can feel the weight of the boy's relentless stare boring a hole between his shoulders.

"He knows you lied about Dean," Hudak says quietly. "I know you did too. I think I know what this is."

"Then you know sitting here whining at me about it isn't helping," Bobby snaps, harsh because he's desperate. "Where the fuck is this famous stretcher you're supposed to be rigging, Kathleen? How about pulling your thumb out of your ass and getting on with your chores instead of bellyaching?"

Hudak stares at him, oddly listless, before she pushes back up and gestures beyond them. "It's done," she says. "I'll get Sam up on his feet."

She walks slowly back towards the cabin and as she goes, Bobby feels Dean finally relax in his arms, looks down into eyes that always did see more than they let on.

"What are you looking at?" Bobby chides him.

Sam's been cut up worse, lost more blood, God knows, is uncomfortably familiar with the weakness, the fatigue, the lightheadedness that only a transfusion can cure. So he holds onto his guts, and keeps marching on, staring down at each footfall and willing himself to keep moving, _put one foot in front of the other, and soon you'll be walking cross the floor_. He focuses on trying to walk from the knees, because swinging his legs from the hips involves his groin, and his groin is attached to his belly, and every pull at it sends pain stabbing through his abdomen. As it is, the slashes are already prickling uncomfortably, and Sam finds himself wondering where the damn thing had its hands before it ripped into him. He sincerely doubts it sang two verses of Happy Birthday while it soaped up with hot water and rubbed vigorously, being extra careful to clean under its nails; fancies instead that it was likely wrist deep in maggot-infested, rotting carcasses.

 _Germs and nasties_ , he can remember Dean telling him when he was a kid. _Germs and nasties_ , backing their trucks up to the scratches, germ-and-nasty kids racing inside and getting first dibs on the biggest bedrooms, while mom and pop germ-and-nasty unpack boxes and rearrange furniture, get his wounds looking just how they want them, maybe even throw a housewarming barbecue and invite all the bacteria in the neighborhood. And he suddenly thinks of his brother's leg, thinks it must be like the Chicago Projects in there by now, like Cabrini-Green back in the nineties, thronging with the drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes and gang-bangers of the germ-and-nasty ecosystem.

On that image, he stops, sits down heavily on the ground. Bobby and Hudak are abreast of him, and Bobby shuffles them to a stop so that Sam is level with his brother's limp hand, dangling down from Hudak's rudimentary pine bed-slat and buttoned-up-jacket stretcher.

"We'll take five," Bobby says, and Hudak follows his lead silently, lowering the stretcher to the ground.

And now Sam is staring into Dean's vacant eyes, and they're blinking lethargically, foggy, miles away, unaware of anything. It's like someone walking over Sam's grave as he remembers sitting watching his brother bundled up on Pa Bender's bed, fighting to stay awake despite pain and exhaustion, because he was afraid to sleep.

Bobby eases down beside Samm, hands him a bottle of water, two pills. "Just the basics, kid," he says. "We need to hold off the good stuff to keep you upright." He glances up to where Hudak is still standing, looking down at them. "Sit, Kathleen," he says. "Just for a minute."

Hudak's face is grayish, her eyes shadowed, and Sam can still see the bruising around her eye from where Dean nutted her. She doesn't sit, and he doesn't know if he's imagining it, but he thinks she might be swaying slightly.

"I'm sick of forests," she says suddenly, irritably. "I'm sick of trees, and undergrowth, and scrub, and soil, I'm sick of moonlit clearings and shadowy glades and dappled fucking sunlight. Shrubs, flowers, babbling brooks, you can stick them up your ass. The woods are lonely, dark and deep, and I am never hiking them again as long as I live. I'm transferring somewhere hot, where all I can see is sand and sea on one side and condos and wealthy second husbands on the other. Where people retire and there's no crime because wheelchairs don't make good getaway cars. Sarasota." And then she takes a deep breath, puts her hand up to her head, and drops, crumpling across his brother's legs.

"Christ," Bobby barks out, scrambling over to start slapping at her cheeks. "Kathleen. Kathleen. Sam, hand me that bottle of water."

Sam obliges, biting off a groan as he leans over. "She's tired. She fainted," he says hopefully.

"She hit her head when that thing threw her up top, it was bleeding," Bobby mutters. He pours water on his hand, slaps her face again. "Dammit, we don't need this now, Kathleen. Come on…"

The click is almost imperceptible but the voice calling in from the trees isn't.

"FBI. Put your hands up where we can see them."

Bobby doesn't hesitate, reaches for the sky, growls at Sam out of the corner of his mouth, "Shut up and follow my lead."

And Sam thinks that in the whole series of firsts they've endured on this trip, it's only right there should be a first time for being glad to see Feds stepping out from behind trees and pointing guns at them.

"Sir, I need to ask you to stand up, slowly now, and back away from your friend."

The man is tall, dark-haired, and Sam squints up at him. "I know you," he blurts out. "Agent Booth. You're here looking for Lee Bender."

"Keep your hands up, sir," the man says, and he spares a quick glance down at Hudak, frowns.

Bobby slowly twists his head around and looks up. "I have ID in my back pocket, agent…?"

"Booth," the Fed confirms. "Is that Deputy Kathleen Hudak?" The man's voice is sharp as he drops to his knees, lays a finger on Hudak's neck, keeping his revolver trained on Bobby and managing to watch both him and Sam at the same time as he checks her over.

Sam slants his eyes over to Bobby, sees the old man lick his lips, sees his eyes narrow as he nods. "It's her, yeah… she hit her head and she seemed fine but she just collapsed. We ran into some trouble out here, my nephew's in a bad way, stepped in a bear trap, and Kathleen, she—"

"Hands up, sir," the man snaps. "We've been looking for the Deputy for nearly a week and until she can confirm otherwise, my assumption has to be that you were involved in her disappearance."

And enough, Sam thinks, because this is a chance to maybe save his brother's life. "We need help," he cuts in, frantic, ignoring how Bobby tenses beside him. "My brother's really sick, and Kathleen too, we've been out here for days… please. Please help us. We're good for it, she'll tell you who we are when she comes round, but please, my brother needs a hospital. Please."

Booth considers them, stands up and steps carefully across Hudak. He squats down again next to Dean, grimaces and sucks in air as he takes in the leg, stands again and motions his gun at Bobby. "I'm going to ask you to stand up, sir, nice and easy, no sudden movements, and let's see your ID."

Bobby pushes up, reaches his hand to his back pocket, steady, pulls out his wallet and hands it over.

"Robert Steven Singer," the Fed reads off Bobby's driver's license, and then he gestures from Sam to the stretcher. "And these two would be?"

"Denver," Bobby says. "Sam and John. My nephews. Friends of Kathleen's. In fact, their Blue Cross cards are in the wallet too. I can get those out for you…?"

The Fed hands the wallet back and Bobby fishes out the cards, offers them over with a hard look at Sam. "We've been out here hiking the woods, and—"

"Lee Bender," Sam barks out. He sees Bobby flinch in his peripheral vision, but he plows on. "Lee Bender was out here. There's a cabin a few miles back there… we came across it after my brother stepped in the trap, thought we could patch him up inside. Lee Bender was there, threw us in the root cellar with a pile of other bodies. Kathleen said you were looking for hikers? For that other deputy – Kelley someone? They were in the root cellar, just go look. Go look. But please get us out of here."

The man regards him for another moment. "Sit tight for a minute."

He moves a few feet off, confers with another flak jacket-clad G-man for a few minutes, and Bobby grunts down at Sam.

"What the hell happened to following my lead?" the old man says, his voice a barely audible growl.

Before Sam has time to respond, Booth is turning back.

"Okay," the man says, and the second agent steps up behind him, kneels, slips a hand underneath Hudak's shoulders and knees, rises up with a grunt. "We're five klicks from the trailhead where we parked," Booth continues smoothly. "There's an air ambulance at Cook Hospital, I'm going to call this in and have them meet you at the trailhead. Agents Lucas and Carlisle are going to hike you out as far as there and travel with you to the hospital."

Sam stares up owlishly, can't even find the words and the Fed stares down for a second before reaching down a hand. Sam takes it, is heaved up. "Thank you," he manages to croak out. "Thank you."

Booth nods, glances across at Bobby. "Now Mr Singer, can you show me where this cabin is on the map? And tell me some more about this situation with Bender?"

Sam leans up against Bobby in the chopper, opposite Agent-Lucas-or-Carlisle, thinks abstractedly that Dean would be climbing the sides if he knew he was flying. Bobby speaks low in his ear while scrub-clad paramedics shine penlights in Hudak's eyes and cluck over Dean's leg.

"Maybe telling that Fed about Bender wasn't the best idea, kid," the old man mutters. "They could ID him if anything's left down there."

Jesus, Sam doesn't want to think, doesn't want to have to rationalize or plan or figure out an alibi. "Do you think there could be anything left?"

Bobby shrugs next to him. "Bound to be something," he whispers. "Maybe not much, and charred real good, but something."

Sam tenses next to him. "You don't think that—"

"No, kid, I think your brother will be fine." Bobby raises his voice as Agent Lucas-or-Carlisle leans forward slightly, rests his elbows on his knees, stares out the window with his left ear pointed right at them.

Sam watches Dean's hand, flopped by his side, fingers barely curled, watches them start to coil tighter. And now Dean's fingers are splaying out, shaking, and his brother is locked tight again, rising up, back arching, eyes wide open and staring blindly, machines beeping wildly, and the paramedics snap out orders to each other in rapid fire medicalese that leaves Sam floundering, _BVM… BP is dropping… how's the mask seal… good, just not working… okay, kiddo, doing it the hard way… intubate… nope, not happening here, neck is locked, can't tip his head back, jaws locked too… throat appears to be in spasm… okay, CRIC kit… hold him down… got it… yep, got it… tube is in… bag him…_

Sam gapes at the paramedic when she turns around, notices for the first time that she's young, maybe not that much older than Dean. She smiles tightly. "We just performed an emergency procedure called a cricothyrotomy on your brother, Sam, because we weren't able to intubate him. It's a small incision at the base of his neck and we've intubated via that, but he may need a proper tracheotomy at the hospital. Can you tell us if John is up to date with his shots?"

"His shots?" Sam answers faintly, because he can't quite catch his breath and his brain is like jello.

Bobby cuts in. "I don't know for sure, but I doubt it."

The woman nods. "We're going to divert to Fairview Medical Center, it's better equipped to deal with this than Cook. He'll get a shot at the hospital, and they'll give him something to control the spasms. Okey dokey, Sam, let's take a quick look at you."

"What's wrong with my brother?" he whispers as she pulls up his sopping wet tee. "I know you know something."

She smiles and it's a genuine smile that goes all the way to her eyes, a sympathetic smile, sympathetic because she thinks Dean is dying, Sam realizes.

"They'll be able to tell you more at the hospital," she says. "We need to deal with you now. Can you tell me how long you've been leaking down here, Sam?"

Sam looks down, sees the red spilling through the dressings, the patch of darker denim staining his jeans from waistband to crotch. He's shaking, he hears the chatter of his teeth and voices phasing in and out, feels himself being eased down, sees Bobby peering over the woman's shoulder. Bobby's lips are moving, but nothing comes out, and Sam fights it but unconsciousness is like the softest featherbed he could possibly imagine sinking into, and he's so tired he can't help himself.

  
There is a distant hum of voices and Sam jerks awake with a low cry, stares around him wildly.

Bobby is sitting next to the bed Sam is lying in, and he scrapes his chair across the floor right up to the rail. "You're Sam Denver," he tells Sam softly. "You're my nephew. We were hiking in the woods with your brother and Kathleen when your brother stepped in a beartrap. We found a cabin nearby, took him there to get help. Bender was there, he was armed, and he threw us in the root cellar. After a couple of days down there, we overpowered him and got out. Last we saw of him was down the pit, and that's all we know."

Sam pushes up on his elbows, feels a twinge in his hand. There's a fluid drip attached to his hand, and Bobby nods.

"They gave you a unit of blood and some fluids to raise your blood sugar, so you'll feel better pretty soon. Did you get any of what I just said?"

"Uh? I think," Sam fumbles back. " Yeah. Yes. I did. What about Dean?"

Bobby shakes his head. "No one's saying anything," he mutters guardedly. "Which isn't very reassuring. That said, it could means he isn't that bad off if there's no sense of urgency about telling us how he's doing."

It doesn't work that way, Sam knows, and he feels a sudden surge of nausea at the mental image of his brother's whole body clenching and flexing in the chopper. "How can he be okay?" he grates out. "He couldn't breathe. They had to cut a hole in him and feed the trach tube in through it. Christ, Bobby, if that had happened in the woods he would have died…" He trails off as Agent Lucas-or-Carlisle leans his head around the doorjamb, slumps back down on to the pillows.

Bobby speaks fast and low. "They got a Fed on the door. Looks like they're still suspicious."

"But Kathleen will back us up," Sam says. "And even if they do ID any bone fragments as coming from Bender, she'll tell them we killed him in self-defense—"

"Eight fuckin' weeks ago, give or take," Bobby cuts in balefully. "Which begs the question as to how the hell he's gallivanting through the woods killing hikers." He leans back in his chair, scowls. "We can't tell Booth we killed Bender even if we do deserve a fuckin' medal for doing it. As far as he knows, we left Bender knocked out cold in the root cellar behind the cabin _you_ told him about. So next time, boy, when I say follow my lead, damn well follow it."

Sam thinks back to the way Dean lay there, and Kathleen Hudak's collapse. "What other option was there?" he whispers. "Realistically?"

Bobby sighs. "I'm sorry, kid, I don't mean to whale on you like this. Maybe it'll be okay. It just was real sudden they came on us. Unexpected, though it was perfect timing given the circumstances. I know you were worried for your brother. And at the very least, throwing Bender in there like that distracted Booth from slapping the cuffs on us."

"Do you think they'll be able to tell when he died from bone fragments?" Sam ventures.

Bobby rubs his brow. "I don't know. Kathleen said that pathologist friend of Booth's is pretty spiffy. If any of Bender's teeth are down there, they might be able to ID him, assuming he's ever seen a dentist."

Sam has a sudden flashback to broken, stained brown teeth leering at him. "I doubt it," he says, and then he progresses on into the awful scenario stretching out in his mind. "But Bobby, if there's anything left of Bender couldn't he still—"

Bobby must reads Sam's mind, because he puts a hand on his arm. "I doubt there'd be enough for Bender to hold onto boy, don't worry," he reassures him. "Without his hair, and blood and marrow, he's gone. But if they do ID any bone fragments, they're gonna want to know why he burned with the rest of them." He drums his fingers on his thigh. "We overpowered him, got out, hightailed it, and he torched himself down there. They must know he was crazy. It's the truth, Sort of. And we'll just have to hope Kathleen uses her head and keeps schtum when she comes round."

Sam stares at the ceiling for a minute, running through it all again in his mind's eye, every moment of it, his own ruthlessness and expediency, and he feels his throat swell. "Back there Bobby," he starts awkwardly, and he can't bring himself to make eye contact with the old man. "When it was going down. I know I—"

"Nothing to be sorry for kid," Bobby says, quiet but firm. "Nothing. You hear me?"

A rap on the door shakes them back to the here and now, and Sam looks up to see the Fed, Booth, hovering in the doorway.

"I need a word if that's convenient, Mr Singer?" he asks, and he's relaxed, easy in his manner as he pulls up a chair on the other side of Sam's bed and gets to the point without any fanfare. "We located the cabin you directed us to, and the root cellar with the bodies. It was burned out, gutted. The bodies are pretty badly charred, some of them are incomplete, just bone fragments really, no ID—"

"Have you heard anything about my brother?" Sam cuts in sharply. "No one is telling us anything."

It stops Booth in his tracks and his eyes are as sympathetic as the paramedic's were when he answers. "I'm sorry, I haven't heard anything… I came straight here. I can try to find out who's caring for him once we get this out of the way if you like?"

"We'd appreciate that, Agent Booth," Bobby says. "And I found ID on a couple of the bodies – a Wesley Schweitzer. A woman… Costello. Something Costello. And one of them was definitely Kathleen's friend – she was alive when Bender threw us in there, I spoke to her, gave her something to eat, but she died soon after that."

Booth takes notes, looks up. "Did you happen to count how many bodies there were?"

"Five, plus Kelley Szuba."

"Six altogether." Booth makes a face. "Well, we think we have seven skulls. Some of them are pretty smashed up, so it's hard to be sure."

"It was pretty dark down there," Bobby says smoothly. "He kept it covered up all the time. Kathleen will tell you."

Something about the other man's manner changes then, just slightly, he goes from businesslike to somber as he stows his notebook back in his jacket pocket and stands up. "You wouldn't happen to have any contact information for Deputy Hudak's next of kin?" he says carefully. "I understand she's married?"

Bobby looks at Sam, back at Booth, back at Sam.

"She's divorced," Sam says. "Her ex-husband is stationed in Iraq as far as I know. She has no close family, they're all deceased. Why do you need to know about next of kin?"

The Fed looks uncomfortable now, glances over at the door.

"Listen, son," Bobby says, and there's a vague menace in his tone that has Booth's head snapping back as the older man moves to stand between the Fed and the door. "We're her family. So tell us what you know."

Booth gives him a hard stare and Bobby matches it until the younger man looks away. "I'll take you to her doctor," he says.

"Sam Denver?"

The woman is blond, attractive in the way that forty-something women who've lived some are, her face alive and animated with everything she's seen and done, and Sam fancies that she's the kind of woman Dean would clamber over a dozen vacuous condom-waving bikini-clad bimbos to get to, because _older women Sammy, they know positions that are fuckin' illegal in all fifty states_.

She unhooks his chart off the end of his bed and flicks her eyes over it. "I'm Doctor McNeill, Sam, I've been treating your brother," she informs him briskly. "You seem to be doing pretty well, I don't think you'll need to stay beyond tomorrow." Her tone softens then. "Now, this situation with your brother is not so straightforward, I'm afraid. He has tetanus – you probably know it as lockjaw. It's pretty rare nowadays, with vaccination, but we're assuming his shots aren't up-to-date. We've immunized him passively, which will help, but he's seriously ill—"

"What does that mean?" Sam chokes out once he manages to draw breath. "Seriously ill? What does that mean?"

"We have him in ICU and ventilated at the moment via tracheotomy since we can't intubate him," McNeill continues. "The bacteria cause the muscle rigidity and spasms you've probably seen him having, so we have him on a tranquilizer and other meds to relax his muscles, as well as antibiotics."

In the background Sam can see Bobby hovering in the doorway, frozen, grim-faced, speechless, and he moves past the woman, stands with a hand on Sam's shoulder. "What's the prognosis?" he says quietly.

"He's seriously ill," she repeats. "But, touch wood, we're not as yet seeing much in the way of autonomic effects… by that I mean damage to his nervous system that could affect his heart rate, cause his blood pressure and body temperature to spike and then fall rapidly."

"So that's good?" Sam manages. "Isn't it?"

McNeill smiles. "Yes, that is good, Sam. Managing autonomic dysfunction is the trickiest aspect of treating tetanus. So we should stay positive. I can get someone to take you up to see him if you feel up to it?"

He nods, then, "I have no pants," he blurts out. "I'm six five, I can't go anywhere with my ass hanging out of a hospital johnnie. I have no pants. Who took my pants? Did they cut my pants off me? That wasn't necessary. I need pants. So I can go see my brother. Pants are what I really need—"

Bobby is leaning down, has Sam by the shoulders, give him a gentle shake.

"I need pants, Bobby," he says thickly. "I need pants so I can go see my brother."

The doctor speaks up from the doorway. "I'll get you some scrubs and a wheelchair, Sam."

"I don't need a wh—"

"I think it's best, don't you?" she says, her voice velvet over steel, the kind of tone that tells Sam she's used to laying down the law to toxic toddlers, tweens, teens and twenty-something guys who don't follow doctor's orders. He buttons it, starts maneuvering himself out of the bed, the room spinning for a full minute while he blinks his eyes hard shut and waits for the floor to stop undulating under his feet.

"Just sit on the bed there," Bobby grumbles, his knees cracking as he kneels down with the scrubs. "Put your feet in the legs." He eases them up partway. "You can do the rest, son."

It's only when Bobby is pushing him along in the wheelchair that Sam remembers.

"Did you find out anything about Kathleen?"

There's no reply, just silent forward momentum towards the bank of elevators at the top of the hallway.

"Bobby?"

The old man heaves out a sigh Sam feels tickle the back of his neck. "It's not good news, Sam."

"Not good news?" Sam echoes. "How can it not be good news? She was fine… she just passed out, she just has a concussion, they must know that. She was talking to us. She's fine. They've got it wrong—"

"She hit her head pretty bad, Sam," Bobby interrupts. "At the side, where it's weaker. It must've happened when that thing threw her out of the pit. She was bleeding in there, inside, under the bone. All the damn time and we didn't know."

Sam feels sick. "She had a headache," he breathes. "She said her head was hurting and we didn't… we didn't think to…"

Bobby pushes the wheelchair over to a bench along the wall, parks up and sits down heavily. "There wasn't anything we could have done to help her, Sam, even if we'd known. But her doctor says the scans show it's a small bleed."

"But she was awake, talking to us," Sam persists. "She was making sense. I don't understand."

"The doctor said that's how it goes sometimes," Bobby says gently. "Said it was a hallmark – patient gets knocked out, comes round and is lucid for a while before the blood builds up and starts putting pressure on the brain. In fact, she said that's a good sign, means she's more likely to pull through this okay."

Sam swipes a hand through his hair. "Can we see her? After we see Dean?"

"She isn't here, kid – they transferred her to Abbot Northwestern in Minneapolis. The ER doc says it's got a shit-hot neurology department. They're operating on her right now."

**23\. Just Keep Swimming**

It's dark in Dean's room, the overhead lights dim. Equipment beeps quietly and flashes regularly, the screens Sam has seen on every hospital drama detailing innocuous sounding things like BP, pulse, sinus rhythm, things he knows can go wrong, can lead to doctors barking out orders, flatlines, lithe nurses leaping up to straddle limp bodies and apply CPR while gurneys fly along hospital corridors to ORs where surgeons tie trendy bandanas over their great hair and operate along to Handel's Water Music, and bleeders happen while anxious relatives watch from glass-enclosed balconies. He knows it always ends with some short, squat nurse calling it, and everyone stepping back from the operating table as it fades to black along to some cheesy Sarah McLachlan song.

Dean looks twelve in hospital beds, always has, and Sam muses that maybe it's because his brother was twelve when he first saw him in a hospital bed, his leg hoisted up, toes peeking pinkly from plaster, his face white and pinched with pain as he bitched about _itchy fuckin' toes, scratch 'em if you wanna live, midget_.

"The nurse says it's dark because bright light could cause him to spasm," Bobby murmurs from next to him. "We need to keep our voices down too, it could set him off. And be careful about touching him – keep it to a minimum."

Sam's gaze travels down the bed, across the bruises, and cuts, and silvery scars, to Dean's foot, heavily bandaged, toes peeking pinkly. He tracks up again to study his brother's face, wills his eyes to crack open. _Please look at me_ , he thinks. _Please tell me to scratch that itch, bitch, and fuck hospital food, get your ass in the car and bring me back something from Kentucky Fried Panda if you want to live…_

"Sam?"

Sam breaks out of his reverie, glances over at Bobby and sees that the old man's eyebrows are racing up towards his hairline.

"Kentucky Fried Panda?" Bobby prompts.

"It's finger ling-ling good," Sam murmurs, snagging the arm of the nurse as she leans over him and tweaks the drip. "Will his foot be okay?"

She flashes white teeth in a sympathetic smile. It's a reminder that every nurse Sam has ever met, ever bonded with across his brother's wrecked body or ever watched his brother flirt with across his own injuries, has always been fucking reassuring, so warm, so compassionate, maybe because they know the writing is on the wall in big letters that say _no chance, but just go through the motions for show or they'll sue_. Her kindness cuts into his heart like condolences, and he has to bite his tongue so he doesn't tell her where she can stow her pity.

"We debrided it, cleared away the dead tissue and he's been lucky," she says. "There's no evidence of infection in the bone, so he should keep the foot. We just really need to keep him still, make sure he doesn't spasm… he could dislocate his shoulders or even fracture his vertebrae. Hopefully that shouldn't happen with him this deeply sedated, but we need to take precautions."

Bobby leans forward, waves to catch her eye. "How long is he expected to be here?"

"We're looking at a good while," the woman says. "It might be three or four weeks, even more, before we can get him breathing by himself and wean him off sedation, but when he comes round he won't be in any pain. He'll be weak, but he won't be hurting bar the odd twinge from his foot."

Sam can already count Dean's ribs, see his hips jutting up from pale blue scrub pants like the ones he's wearing. "He'll be hungry," he notes. "He hasn't eaten in a few days." He knows his voice is small and afraid, because it's his eight-year-old voice talking about his twelve-year-old brother lying there all broken in pieces and defenseless.

"He's pretty skinny as is," the nurse concedes. "I'm Mason, by the way – I guess we'll be seeing a lot of each other. We're tube feeding him – that's the line going into his abdomen, just there under the gauze. The nerve activity involved in tetanus burns a lot of calories, so he may still lose some muscle mass."

Three weeks, four. Maybe more. It'll be the longest Dean has ever been still. Sam wheels himself closer to the bed, rests his arm up next to Dean's, watching over his brother but not touching. It's all he can do not to put his hand over Dean's, not to hold onto him in the way he never gets to unless unconsciousness is in the equation, when it's him that needs the comfort of contact.

"You can hold his hand," Mason says suddenly. "I don't think it'll cause a spasm." She smiles again as Sam looks up at her mutely, winks as she turns to leave.

"You okay, boy?" Bobby says from behind Sam as she exits.

Sam's guts sting, his shoulders ache where he impacted with the walls of the root cellar, and his throat is bruised where Bender gripped it. He opens his mouth, almost says yes by rote, swallows it back down. "What do you think would be worse, Bobby," he asks instead, as he watches his brother's face. "Do you think it would be worse to actually see it happen or get a phone call, maybe months later because he had a fake ID on him when it happened?"

There's no answer, just the quiet whirr of machinery.

"Do you think it would be worse to hold onto him as it happens or have the morgue give me a baggie with his ring and his amulet in it, and ask me if they're his? Or maybe walk me to the deep freeze where they've had him on ice for weeks on end?" Sam looks over his shoulder, and Bobby's face is impassive. "That's my future," he says softly. "That's my future and his future." He looks back down at his hand, and he lays it over his brother's and grips it loosely.

"Is this you saying you're going back to school?" Bobby says, and Sam doesn't answer.

The quiet hangs over them like a pall for a moment before Bobby clears his throat. "I don't know what would be worse," he responds. "But I know I'd want to be there with him. Being there would make a difference. Even if it only meant he wasn't alone when it happened. Wouldn't you want him there with you? Wouldn't you want him to be able to go on knowing you weren't by yourself at the end?"

Sam wants to ask what kind of choice that is. He wants to yell that it isn't fucking fair, that he wants normal, that he wants the mother he never knew, that he wants to have sat at home wistfully watching his brother heading out to shoot hoops with his friends instead of parenting him, wants his dad to have hung a dreamcatcher over his bed and mixed up cologne and water in a spray bottle and told him it was monster repellent to squirt in the closet at bedtime, instead of giving him a gun. He wants his folks to have driven him to college, helped him carry his stuff to his dorm room, met his roommate, maybe one day met the girl he wanted to marry. Wants Dean to have fixed cars and found himself a good woman.

But he can't yell because he needs to be quiet for his brother, and he sucks it all back inside. Instead something else slips out, and he doesn't know why because he isn't even thinking about it. "What was your son's name?"

Bobby takes it in stride. "His name was Jacob," he says. "Jacob Robert Singer."

And maybe this is the reason why it came to Samm, he thinks, as Bobby's words in the pit echo around his mind. "I can't remember what my brother looks like living," he whispers. "I mean, _really_ living."

"You will, son," the old man replies quietly. "You will."

"But he's so still. He's been hurt, hurt bad. But he's never been this still. He's never been _not there_." Sam drifts off for a minute watching Dean, jolts back to a tap on the shoulder.

"I said, what happened down there anyway?" Bobby prompts. "I came round just as Kathleen was dropping the ladder in. How did you light the place up?"

It had been crazed, Sam isn't really sure he can recall it all clearly but it's a distraction he can use, so he tries. "Kathleen found a bottle of moonshine and my lighter, threw them down to me. I torched the bones and pop went the weasel."

Bobby huffs. "What about the wendigo?"

Sam finds that he's savoring the moment. "Dean killed it with his ring."

Bobby gapes. "How the hell did he manage that?"

"Sunk his fist right in where you opened it up. Elbow deep, like he was freeing up the S bend, or birthing a cow, or fisting a—"

"I get the message, Sam. Jesus."

Sam manages a grin "It was fucking awesome, Bobby. Awesome."

"Boy's so sharp he'll cut his throat one of these days." Bobby stands up, stretches. "Will you be okay here for a while? I'm going to get a cab into Hibbing, pick up the car and find us a motel. I need to hack into Blue Cross and take his health insurance to the next level. Using it for drive-by stitches is one thing, but if he's in here for a month or more I'll need to lay down some background so we don't come unstuck. I'll be back in a couple of hours." He ruffles Sam's hair. "Make sure he don't go anywhere."

Mason walks in again as Bobby leaves, scribbles something on Dean's chart. "Lot of scars your brother has there," she comments. "Is he military?"

"No," Sam says mechanically. "Farming accident. He got sucked into a combine harvester. Forgot to switch it off first, leaned in, and _bam_."

It turns out the fact they don't see much tetanus in these parts or anywhere because of vaccination means that every morning when Sam arrives at the ICU there's a small battalion of fresh-faced interns clustered around the bed while McNeill hisses out words like _pathogenesis_ , and _clostridium tetani_ , and _pre-synaptic acetylcholine_ at them. After two weeks of strange eyes, strange hands, and some really strange interns, Sam decides he's had it to here and tells her in no uncertain terms that his brother isn't an exhibit at her personal petting zoo.

"Since tetanus is so rare, many physicians have little experience with its serious complications and management," she intones grandly, and Sam stops her there.

"I like you Doctor McNeill, I really do," he says. "When my brother wakes up, he's going to like you too. More than you can possibly imagine. But since my brother is rare, and you don't have any experience with his serious complications and management, please stop using him for show and tell. Please."

She frowns. She's unconvinced, Sam can tell, so, "Look," he says. "My brother, he's pretty quiet, withdrawn." _You fuckin' liar Sammy_ , he can hear in his head, and in there Dean's voice is heavy with admiration, respect, because lying is his brother's second language and if there's one thing he appreciates it's the ability to spin one like Nixon. "He guards his privacy," Sam adds, making his voice plaintive, and he gazes shyly down at her through _puppy dog fuckin' eyes, bitch, that's cheating_.

McNeill smiles, and her face lights up. "Okay, Sam. Point taken." She spins on her heel, walks towards the door.

"Wait a minute, Doc," Sam calls after her. He needs to know, he's thought about it since day one, scanned his brother's face for signs, stared at his closed eyelids for long moments. "Does he dream?" he says. "Does he dream when he's like this?"

She quirks her mouth. "Well, Sam, I can't tell you for sure. But he's under so deep I doubt it. I don't know much about dreams but I'm pretty sure we only have them in REM sleep and this is much deeper than that." She studies him for a minute, reads him, or so it seems. "This is peaceful sleep, Sam," she assures. "He won't be dreaming about anything that might have happened to him. I'm as sure as I can be about that."

Maybe it's the first peaceful, dreamless sleep his brother has had in twenty-three years, since they were set adrift on _that_ night, and it's like Sam's own load suddenly lightens. He sits down as the woman leaves, leans up close to the monitor so the blue glow falls across the page of his book, ponders the weird anomaly of seeing Dean lying in a hospital bed, his expression serene even though he's as sick as he has ever been.

"Hey Dean," he says, quiet and easy. "Looking good, dude. Maybe it'll be time to wake up soon, huh? You've had so many antibiotics, I think your sweat must be medicinal by now. Feel better. Feel better, huh?"

He opens the book, finds where he left off, starts to read to his brother. "He hated to break the lovely stillness of dawn by using his voice but he couldn't think of any other way to locate the mysterious new friend who was nowhere to be seen, so Wilbur cleared his throat…"

Abbott Northwestern is vast, thronging, worse than O'Hehir. Bobby has never been around this many people, which means he can't help doing the odds and working out that there's bound to be at least one demon on the premises.

His gas station bouquet is pathetic by comparison to the roses, roses, and more roses sprouting from every flat surface in Hudak's room, and he blows a layer of traffic dust off the unhappy looking generic blooms before he makes his presence known, hovering in the doorway, cap in hand.

"Who are you?" Hudak says distantly. "Another person I used to know before I hit my head?"

Bobby gapes and she waits a few seconds before smirking.

"I'm joking, Bobby."

"Well it isn't funny," he chastises as he pulls up a chair. "How's the head?"

"Pretty okay, albeit shaved," she reports. "Looks like it does when you get your cat neutered." She smiles faintly. "But still, having my brain makes up for it, I guess. It was a small bleed. I'm alert, my memory's fine and I haven't been confused at all. I may not develop post-traumatic epilepsy, but on the other hand… Overall, I'm lucky." Her voice catches in her throat. "So lucky it makes me feel sick to think that I might have been unlucky."

"Yeah," Bobby mutters. "Me too."

"So. Guess I let you down out there," she starts. "Booth tells me they found you right after I nosedived."

Bobby snorts. "Let us down the hell. You went above and beyond, have done since the day you met the boys. And I need to tell you I'm sorry. Near bit your head off out there, and it was uncalled for. If I'd known…"

Hudak wriggles up higher in the bed. "We were all under pressure," she recalls. "We were worried. All of us." She's casting nervous glances at Bobby, eyes flicking back and forth. "So… is he doing any better?"

Bobby nods. "He's been pretty sick. He's still being ventilated and they have him in a medical coma for the spasms. But he's past the worst of it and the doc says she might even have a go at bringing him out of it in a day or so."

"Three weeks," Hudak marvels. "How's Sam been coping with that?"

Grimacing at the reminder, Bobby says, "He was pretty skippy at first, but you know I think he values the peace and quiet."

"Ouch. Did you mean it to sound that way?" Hudak asks, lifting a sarcastic eyebrow, and Bobby grins.

"No, in fact I did not," he concedes. "What I mean is he values the fact Dean's getting some peace and quiet. He called me just now, tells me the doc said Dean can't dream because of the drugs, that he's peaceful." He pauses a beat, finds the thought is a comfort. "Means a lot to him that his brother's resting free of all of this."

Hudak smiles. "Yeah. It is a good feeling to know that."

"So, you're doing pretty okay then," Bobby ventures. "Think this'll affect you in the job at all?"

"No clue. Depends on what happens over the next few months… they tell me seizures are a possibility. The further along that happens, the more likely epilepsy is, which might be a problem." She shrugs. "Guess I'll drive off that bridge when I get to it. There are drugs. Hopefully I won't end up riding a desk."

She chews her lip for a minute, seems lost in thought, and Bobby glances at the roses. "Pretty flowers," he offers.

"Yeah, I think my ex is finally apologizing after all these years," Hudak says wryly.

They sit quietly for a moment before Bobby speaks again. "I'm assuming you spoke to the Feds then? They pulled their guys off Dean's room a couple of days back."

She nods. "Booth was pretty interested to know how Bender was still walking around when he was eight weeks dead." She huffs out as his face falls. "Don't ask me how, but they identified him."

"And what did you tell him?" Bobby sputters.

"Booth had one fairly grainy photo of Bender, and I just told him it wasn't the guy who threw us in the pit," she says with a grin. "I told him I never got a really good look at Lee first time round, so that's why I thought it was him at first – and that the fact he'd told me he thought Lee was out there played into me just hazarding a guess, really. And that the head injury must've confused me. He seems convinced."

That's so much better than Bobby hoped for that he can't help smacking his clenched fist down on his thigh in triumph. "So they think it's some other guy?"

"Yep. And that he killed Bender and dumped him down there. So we're in the clear. They'll search for a while longer and then just wait for more hikers to disappear. Which they won't, so all's well."

She smirks, self-satisfied, and Bobby chuckles. "I'll give you that one," he says. "You have your moments, Kathleen. You sure as hell do."

She smiles, lifts something off the nightstand to her right. "They have me doing things that involve concentration," she says. "Poker? For money?"

"You're on."

V-day is what Mason calls it, and Sam hovers nervously as they remove the tube. "We'll start weaning him off the sedatives now," she smiles, and it's funny but now when she curls her mouth it comforts Sam.

Day one of the rest of his brother's life is what he calls it, as Dean starts breathing on his own. The silence is deafening without the thrum of the ventilator and Sam sits, watches, ever-alert, his eyes glued to Dean's chest rising and falling under its own steam for the first time in almost a month. He listens to every single breath, counts them, twelve breaths per minute, give or take. That's seven hundred and twenty breaths an hour, he calculates, seventeen thousand, two hundred and eighty breaths a day.

After fifty one thousand, eight hundred and forty breaths, Dean opens his eyes.

He doesn't talk and his eyes are glassy and empty. Mostly they gaze blankly into space, but sometimes Sam sees them follow him around the room the way he remembers the eyes in Bobby's _RFK in 68_ campaign poster always used to when they were kids. Dean doesn't move except to shift his hands from time to time, and when he does that Sam tenses, waits for them to flex and clench, waits for alarms to sound, but Dean just scrapes and picks at the sheets.

"He's still real weak," the physical therapist _call me Abbey, cause you know what, hon? That's my name!_ , tells Sam when she stops by to do his brother's rehab. "I read up on it. Lockjaw takes a lot out of a body, clenches it up inside. Like this." She fists her hand so tight Sam can see it shake slightly, her eyes spark bright blue at him behind her glasses, and she even bares her teeth in a silent growl though Sam doesn't think she's aware of it.

Watching her minister to his brother is hypnotic. She hums under her breath, stray locks of that reddish-blond hair chicks like to call strawberry come loose, and her glasses slip slowly down her nose when she leans over the bed, so that she has to push them back up every few minutes. It's like a dance, Sam fancies, as she stretches Dean's limbs, laces her fingers through his and circles his arms at the shoulder, smoothes her fingers up and down them, rubs the muscles back to life. She rolls him onto his side and drives the heel of her hand up his spine, long, slow, reverent strokes, runs her hands up the full length of his legs, bends them at the knee and circles them at the hip, kneads into his thighs, with her fingers, knuckles, palms.

Her concentration speaks of care, and on the one hand her worship of his brother's body is uncomfortably erotic; but on the other, it's utterly detached, a job of work, and for some reason it reminds Sam of Dean's hands cleaning the guns, how his brother's eyes gleam with appreciation at perfectly balanced sights and mechanisms, while his hands are economical, efficient, practical.

Abbey never mentions Dean's scars, and Sam is pathetically grateful that she can work on his brother's hide without comment, that she sees past the damage. She only clucks over reddish patches on Dean's shoulders and hips at the back there, and tells Sam to show them to the nurses, reminds Sam to make sure the bottom sheet is stretched good and smooth underneath Dean, because creases will turn those red patches into pressure sores, advises him to bring pillows for his brother's heels to rest on, and to change his position every hour.

She's there on the dot of 10am and 4pm every day, and Sam could swear Dean is lapping it all up, smirking at him with his eyes even though his features are lax.

After one hundred three thousand six hundred and eighty breaths, Dean looks at Sam and sees him. He frowns lazily, and then he moves his lips.

Sam surges up out of his chair, his book falling to the floor, leans down close. "What?" he says frantically. "Dean. What? Tell me?"

Dean's voice is a distant hoarse whisper, a burnt toast voice slowly creaking up out of his throat over long seconds. "Who am I…?"

And Sam barks out a high-pitched lunatic giggle of relief, _joy_. "You're John… John Denver…"

Eyes widening, Dean manages a scowl. " _John f'kn' D'nver?_ F'kn… pr'k."

It's a brief glimpse of lucidity. Dean mumbles incoherently every now and then for the rest of the day, and even though his eyes look more alert, he's wary. Some time after midnight he regains the use of his vocal cords and screams himself into a wild-eyed, sweat-soaked, shivering wreck, pulling mindlessly at drips, flailing his arms so that blood spatters across Sam's face from where the butterfly needle tears out of his skin. He erupts out of the bed and rolls himself across the floor in a frenzy of terror that has McNeill yelling for security. Sam is pushed aside as thickset men in uniform wrestle his brother, who is alternately hollering and sobbing out pleas that make it abundantly clear exactly what he's afraid of, back onto the bed while McNeill readies a syringe and buries it in Dean's arm.

Dean's pleas are quieter but no less desperate as he drifts away and McNeill fixes Sam with an icy stare, motions him outside into the hallway.

"Is there anything more you need to tell me about your brother's injuries, Sam?" she asks, and her tone is so sharp Sam reckons it could cut firewood. "And you can cut the macho bullcrap because if he was attacked in the way he seemed to be indicating, we need to—"

"It was a long time ago," Sam cuts in. "You don't need to. It was a long time ago. This guy in the woods, he looked like the guy who did it. It just – brought it all back, I guess."

McNeill looks at him for a long, endless moment, her eyes searching his face for some sign he's feeding her a line. "Has he had an HIV test?" she queries finally.

"Yes, negative," Sam mutters. "He's fine. He's been through a lot. But he'll be fine. He just has the odd bad dream."

McNeill shakes her head in annoyance. "These are things we need to know now that your brother isn't under sedation," she reproves. "He's lucky he didn't get hurt, weak as he is."

Sam stares at his sneakers, mute, doesn't know what to say.

"Did he get any help?" the woman follows up, kinder now. "Counseling?"

Sam snorts. "He's not exactly the sharing type."

Frowning, McNeill notes, "Well, that was pretty strong stuff in there. Maybe you should try and persuade him, huh?"

Nodding at her Sam trots out the lie. "I will."

Dean wakes with a dull, stuffed head, tries to sit up and fails miserably, sinking back onto the pillows. But it turns out helplessness has its perks, and he's more than happy to have _I'm Mason_ and her minion, _this is Dixon_ , lean over him and heave him up with that sturdy strength all nurses possess, rock-hard biceps brushing his cheeks so he can lean in and inhale Secret Platinum Strength or whatever the heck it is they wear.

And so Dean spends the next hour or so sliding himself back down the bed, pressing the call button and feebly asking whichever of them turns up to pull him up again, injecting just the right note of embarrassed apology into his voice, glancing up shyly, blinking slowly, fluttering his eyelashes. And they're smitten, like they always are, and they lean over him again, and if he sniffs hard enough there it is: faint underlying sweat that has him practically panting, because it turns out that now he's up and at it, he's sure as hell up and at it. And there's nothing like that faint underlying scent of _real_ women, women with needs, women with _flesh_ that he can sink his fingertips into, suck into his mouth, women with parts that jiggle when they aren't really supposed to but they're so secure in themselves they don't care, women who don't constantly ask if their ass looks big in this, and hell yeah, if he's honest, it's older women, _fuck-me boots_ , and the way they—

"How does a sponge bath sound, John?" Mason trills.

Dean is almost certain that when he says, "Sounds damn great," he trills too.

"I'll bet you're desperate to get cleaned up," she remarks obliviously.

"Desperate," Dean echoes her, faintly and, well, _desperately_.

"We've been topping and tailing you all these weeks, didn't want to set you off," she chatters, and _Jesus_ , she brought the water, towels, and Dean doesn't even have time to go to the safe place, she's folding down the sheet, tilting him on his side, laying a towel there.

"Topping and tailing?" he croaks. " _Set me off_?"

"Even a slight touch can set of spasms with tetanus," she confirms, and God help him but she's dipping the cloth in the water, wringing it out. Spasms, _Christ_ , and Dean focuses on spasms, pain, woods, trees, bushes, root cellars, monsters, angry spirits.

"We'll start at the top," Mason decides. "I'll need to roll you over on your side to do your back, and then I'll work down. Need to get into all the creases."

"Uh," Dean whispers. "Creases…?"

"Yep, and then we'll do the bottom half."

 _Bottom half_.

In Dean's brain, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is singing the Hallelujah Chorus, only they're singing Hallefuckin'lujah. And Jesus, wet cloth describing soapy figure-eights all over his neck, chest, pits, arms, and Mason stares hard as she washes between each finger, and holy crap, that means she's going to do the exact same thing to his fuckin' _toes_. And then she's wiping his belly, and warm water trickles down, before she rolls him, starts languidly passing the newly moistened cloth across his shoulders, across, around, down, to the small of his back, and then she tugs the scrub pants down, and Holy Mary, mother of God, Dean realizes that _is_ what she meant when she said creases—

"How do you feel this morning, John?"

"No I wasn't!"

Dean bleats it out, squawks it in fact, at a vaguely recognizable blond who popped up so unexpectedly he's full sure she teleported in.

"Mason, think you can finish up later?"

_No! No, no, no-the-fuck-no!_

Doctor McNeill _we met last night, John, though you might not remember_ is immune to him, it seems, though it doesn't stop Dean's eyes crossing as she leans over him, her blouse gaping just slightly between her breasts, so that he gets an eyeful of _flesh_ , and fuck, _lace with a rose appliquéd in the center_. And _thank you, God_ , he crows inwardly, because that thing is lifting and separating just for him at this moment in time.

"Lean forward, John."

"Fuck yes," Dean breathes, and Jesus, he's going in, and he may be some time, might even need a goddamn snorkel because that's a hell of a—

"Okay, you can lie back now."

"No!" he squeaks.

McNeill tenses. "I'm sorry, John, what was that?"

"No…" Dean clears his throat, manages to wrestle it back down into something vaguely male, though it's still high enough that he sounds like one of those Ancient Roman guys who had their balls cut off and spent the rest of their lives putting grapes in Julius Caesar's mouth, unicorns, whateverthefuck, no, _eunuchs_. "No sign of, uh, my brother yet I suppose?" he covers.

McNeill glances at her wristwatch. "Perhaps he's catching up on some sleep," she remarks. "He's been burning the midnight oil here, even spent a few nights in the chair."

She studies his chart, clucks her tongue off the roof of her mouth, looks up. "You've been quite unwell this last month, John," she says brightly. "Your foot was badly infected, tetanus in fact. But you were lucky, it wasn't as severe as it could have been. Though of course, with vaccination this could all have been avoided."

Dean gapes at her. "A month? I've been here a month?"

She nods. "Give or take. We had you heavily sedated until a few days ago, to control the spasms."

"Spasms…" Dean blinks hard, has this dim memory of Bobby gripping him tight, of rigid joints, bone-snapping pain, the feeling giant hands were holding onto him at either end and wringing the life out of him like water from a washcloth.

"Now. About last night, John," McNeill continues, and Dean scowls, because her voice is all dread mixed with thrilled, the way a terminally sick man pronounces the name of his disease. "Do you remember your nightmare? Some of the things you said suggested that you might have been assaul—"

"Stop there," he yelps, but horror swells suddenly in his throat and he thinks it must show in his face, because he sees her narrow her eyes. "It was a long time ago," he mutters. "I'm over it."

"I can arrange a psych consult," she says. "Some counseling."

He almost laughs out loud, and it's on the tip of his tongue to tell her that any shrink that gets him on her couch will be running screaming from the building within five minutes. "I'm fine," he insists. "It was a long time ago. All this, this, getting beat up on… just brought it back is all. I mixed it all up in my head."

She stares at him again for a minute, a look that drills into him. "Any pain, John?"

Moving on, and Dean sighs out his relief so vehemently the subsequent lack of oxygen makes him feel spaced out and dizzy. "No. But. I feel so fuc— _freakin'_ tired," he reports, because she's the damn doctor and she's supposed to fix him, but also because he really is jaded, drained, fed up. "My arms, hands…" He looks down at them slumped by his sides, hands palm up, fingers curled up just slightly. "I'm so tired I can't even twitch my fingers. I'm telling my pinky to twitch right now…" He flares his nostrils, stares at the digit for emphasis. "And bupkis."

She smiles, fondly if he isn't much mistaken. "It's only been a few days since you came round, John, and you've been very ill. Seriously ill. You've lost muscle mass and condition… tube feeding can't keep up with this illness. We'll be starting you on soup today, maybe some jello, work up to solids over the next couple of days, small frequent meals."

"Hospital freakin' food," Dean glowers. "That should be against the Geneva Convention."

McNeill hooks his chart back on the end of the bed. "I'll mark you down for extra jello," she says as she clicks away on her heels.

"Chocolate," Dean calls after her hopefully. "And can I get a burger with that?"

Drifting back to consciousness a few hours later, Dean opens his eyes again to see Bobby parked in the chair next to his bed.

Bobby beams at him. "Good to see you, boy. Real good."

And Dean finds he can't answer, can't squeeze the words past the lump in his throat, so he just lies there for a minute, meets the old man's gaze and smiles, until Bobby clears his throat and looks away.

"Food," Dean manages to force out then. "Did you bring food?"

Bobby's eyes snap back to his, wide and more than a little freaked.

"S'matter?" Dean fishes. "Bobby?"

The old man makes a face. "Just. Reminded me of waking up in the root cellar. That other cop was there, Kathleen's friend. She kept asking me for food, if I brought food." He rubs his jaw. "Haven't really thought about it all that much while you've been here."

Dean shifts a tad, because that's all he can manage. "Counseling," he says.

Bobby looks up, questioning.

"Counseling," Dean repeats tiredly. "Maybe you need counseling. Or a psych consult."

Bobby's no fool. "You mean the Doc told you a psych consult or counseling might help _you_ ," he says shrewdly.

He never could really hide much from Bobby, not ever, after all these years of care and love. "I, uh. Had a nightmare," Dean says softly. "A 747 at maximum thrust nightmare. So they tell me. I don't really remember it. But, uh, apparently some things became clear. To them. About what Bender did back then. So…"

"Your brother told me," Bobby says placidly. He taps his hand on his thigh a couple or three times. "Psych consult," he muses thoughtfully. "Might be a good idea, son. When you think about it." He's careful, picks his way through the sentence like he's hopping from rock to rock across a stream. "Might help you to, uh, think it all through and come to terms, maybe—"

"No," Dean mutters. "I said no. I'm not telling some shrink that, I just—" He has to stop to catch his breath. "What the fuck is the point? Nothing is ever going to make it better, Bobby. Nothing is ever going to make it go away. I want it to be in the past now. I want to move on."

Bobby studies him for a minute. "Think you can?" he inquires bluntly. "Move on? Wasn't moving on supposed to be what you were doing before, when you were drinking yourself into oblivion every day and shooting my dogs?"

Dean feels his face grow hot. "But I think I can this time," he says earnestly. "Last time… it's like even though Lee was dead, I never got away from him. But this time – I did. I fought that sonofabitch, took that piece of myself back. Told the fucker… I told him." He smiles weakly. "You should've heard me, Bobby. You'd have been proud of me."

The old man's eyes go shiny for a second. "I've always been proud of you, boy," he says gruffly. "Always. Always will be."

Sam is power walking along the hallway, his jacket wrapped tight around the gift, nodding innocently at nurses. He has a close escape as McNeill hails him and then gets distracted by _the inefficiency, ineptitude and lack of initiative in this damned department!_ , skids around the corner and into his brother's room.

"I got something for you," he announces, and then his heart sinks at the stifled sounds of a nightmare, heaving breaths, quiet whimpers of fright seeping out from behind the screen surrounding his brother's bed.

He drops his duffel, closes the door over, can damn well do without McNeill calling in the cavalry, can damn well do without a setback that will have Dean doped to the eyeballs and staring at him in bewildered confusion again on the day he's supposed to be walking out of here. He pulls back the screen, and—

" _Fuck_! Sam! What the fuck?"

Nurse Dixon springs off his brother like Dean just shoved a firecracker up her and Sam wonders for a minute if that might be exactly what did happen as she blushes a furious red and rams her arms back through the sleeves of her scrub top.

"Jesus, Sam, you nearly gave me another fuckin' heart attack," Dean barks. "Warn a guy for Christ's sake, announce yourself or knock, or something."

Sam squints, furrows his brow. "Dean. What's that all over your face? And your chest?"

Dean doesn't even blush. "Chocolate jello, fucktard. And if you hadn't just cockblocked me yet again, I was about to lick it off her—"

Sam spins, almost overbalances. "Wait! Nurse Dixon! You've got chocolate handprints on your…"

The woman doesn't let the door hit her ass on the way out and Sam briefly wonders how she's going to navigate her way past McNeill to the staff lounge before Dean starts sniffing loudly.

Sam pulls the bag out of his jacket, holds it up. "Double bacon cheeseburger and fries. I supersized it."

Dean's face splits in a grin. "Christ, Sammy. You're like a brother to me sometimes, I swear it…"

Dean is wide-eyed as he wraps his chops around the sandwich, grease leaves a shiny trail down his chin, and he chews so noisily he sounds like a cow pulling its hoof out of mud, slurps like the wendigo, in fact, and Sam says as much.

"You sound like the wendigo."

Raising a quizzical eyebrow, Dean rams a handful of fries into his mouth.

"When it ate," Sam clarifies. "The wendigo. You sound like it. Family trait, maybe."

Dean gulps the mouthful down, wipes his chin with the back of his hand. "Bitch," he retorts. "You got my clothes?"

Sam nods, gestures at the duffel he abandoned just inside the door so he could pin his brother to the bed before the explosion.

"Freedom at last," Dean marvels. "Can't fuckin' believe it. Bobby get off okay?"

"Yeah," Sam confirms. "Told him we'd be there tomorrow, probably, late afternoon."

Dean shakes his head. "Not so fast, boy wonder. There's something I need to get out of the way first, so we'll need to make a pitstop, might take a few hours so—"

"I spoke to her actually, said you might drop by," Sam interrupts. "She's doing pretty good, no headaches and she said she—"

"World's largest ball of twine," Dean jumps in abruptly. "It's in Darwin. It's a must-see. Nurse Dixon said so. Thought we'd head out there first thing after we pack up. Maybe hit the Spam Museum too. Austin. It'll mean taking the scenic route, but it's not too far out of the way."

"But I thought you'd want to—" Sam starts, only to be cut off again.

"Break in my new boots? Damn right. Spam Museum's the perfect place." Dean cackles. "Spam, spam, lovely spam. Wonderful spam."

And Sam knows this, knows it from old. This is his brother detaching himself, shaking the dust off his boots, onward motion, straight ahead, because Dean is like a shark, has to keep moving forward or he'll sink into the black, bottomless depths of this ocean and die, and he leaves a swirling trail of missed connections and one-nighters in his wake. And for some weird reason it makes Sam think of Jess, of that connection he made, and he wonders if Dean will ever have that, thinks maybe his brother never really had it with that Cassie chick despite the fact he told her what he did, because Sam knows damn well that when you find it, you don't walk away from it.

"You and Kathleen," Sam begins carefully. "Well. You seemed to. Get along. Well. I mean. What I mean to say is that, uh…"

"Bring it home, Sammy," his brother replies acidly. "Use your words."

"That thing," Sam says awkwardly. "You know how it… that whole replaying loop it had going? It replayed… something. In the root cellar."

Dean stares at him blankly.

"You were pretty out of it," Sam stumbles on. "But it sounded like you and Kathleen had, were… that you got along. Well." He's looking Dean right in the eye. " _Really_ well."

Dean scratches his chin, releases a leisurely exhale. "Not fifteen minutes ago, Sammy, Nurse Dixon was licking chocolate jello off my nipples," he says. "And I was planning on doing the same for her. I'd say that's proof positive Hudak isn't exactly my wonderwall, wouldn't you?" He hmmphhs in emphasis, raises his eyebrows, and rams in another handful of fries.

Sam eases back in the chair, rests his sneakers up on the bed, laces his fingers together and rests his hands on his belt buckle, hums softly to himself, counts down. Ten. Nine. Eight. Sev—

"Anyway, she's better off without us," Dean snaps out suddenly, in between chewing. "We brought her nothing but trouble, both fuckin' times, nearly got her killed."

Six. Five. F—

"She could have lost her job. She still could, Bobby says this head-bleeding thing could end up giving her epilepsy. They drilled a fuckin' hole in her skull, for Christ's sake." Dean sounds indignant now, the tone he always uses when he's trying to kid himself. "Anyway. I heard her say it, Sam, after that thing dragged you out of there and she thought I was sleeping. She said she wished she'd never met us, and she's damned right because we're nothing but trouble. So I say we get on our way, and leave the woman in peace. Capische?"

Sam considers it all. "So you're not even going to stop by and thank her?"

"I'm not doing this with you," Dean insists.

It has a note of finality that sounds pretty convincing, so what the hell, Sam fires another salvo. "Bobby and I had a lot of time to talk down there in that root cellar. He said maybe some part of you doesn't want this life, wouldn't have chosen it, and that—"

"Well of course I wouldn't have fuckin' chosen it," Dean interjects crabbily. "Jesus. But that doesn't mean I don't want it." His tone softens. "We do good things. We save people. We make a difference."

"And that's enough?" Sam pushes.

Dean looks at him, steady, intense. "Yes it is. It is enough."

"But you said you had dreams," Sam reminds him softly. "Dreams that weren't this."

"Had," his brother replies. "Had. Not _have_ , Sam. This is what I do, and what I am. I don't think beyond it, or look beyond it, or want beyond it. This is how it is for me." His eyes narrow for a second, grow suspicious. "Is this _you_ , Sam?" he adds sourly. "Is this _you_ walking? Is that what this is? Don't turn it into me if it's you."

Sam sighs out a deep exhale, shakes his head. "No, it isn't me walking, Dean. Family business, remember?"

But in his head, he thinks he doesn't want to live this life forever.

Dean looks blearily at his wristwatch. It's seven-thirty in the morning, and the world's largest ball of twine is a few hundred miles in the opposite direction, because he pulled on his jeans and new boots, snuck out of the motel room, and drove all the way back into Hibbing after leaving a hastily scribbled note, _gone out, back soon_ , for his brother.

He's plowing a furrow on Hudak's porch, rubbing his hand across his brow, down to his jaw and back again, because he's nervous. He feels like he's taking a leap into the unknown, doesn't know what the fuck he's doing or why he's even here if he's honest, does know that if his smarticles were fully functioning he'd still be tucked up in bed heckling his brother for _coffee, bitch, now_.

"I made coffee."

"Jesus!" Dean almost jumps out of his skin, whirls and goggles at her. "Your hair," he breathes. "It's. It's really fuckin' sh—"

Hudak's stare is like frost.

"Like mine," he trails off lamely, but he tries it on anyway. "I like it. It suits you."

She doesn't invite him in, just leans on the doorjamb, arms folded.

"How are you?" Dean tries. "Pretty close call, Bobby said."

She nods. "For both of us."

Dean picks it up and runs with it. "Oh, I'm good," he races out. "Just out of condition mainly. Everything else is fine though, slept through most of it. Leg's good. So. I'm good."

Another nod. "That's… good."

Dean has this weird feeling of claustrophobia, of being suffocated, and Hudak is staring, flinty eyed, as if she's waiting. And he doesn't feel reasonable or rational at all, so it all spills out.

"I want to stay somewhere forever. I want boring, I want mundane and everyday. I want to read the newspaper and walk the dog and mow the grass. I want a leaf blower and a kitchen with a junk drawer. I want to shovel snow off my driveway and plan my vacation. I want an honest living. I want to complain about my boss and have a drink after work with the guys. I want to push my kids on the swings. I want a life. I want _normal_."

Hudak still watches, still leans. "Would you have done it?" she says suddenly. "Back then in the woods. Would you have done it?"

Dean knows exactly what she's talking about, doesn't even have to think on it. "Yes I would," he says quietly. "To stop that thing from taking you? I would, in a heartbeat."

She nods again, and then she turns to go back inside.

 _Well, fuck_ , Dean thinks, though he doesn't blame her really. But he feels better for having seen her, reached out or whatever the fuck that was, because he still doesn't really know. He spins, starts walking.

"I said I made coffee."

And it turns out she never shut the door, and so Dean walks back up the porch steps, keeps walking. He walks her right back up against the wall, with a hand planted on the hard surface on either side of her face, and then he leans in and lays his head just where her shoulder meets her neck, and he kisses her right there, feels her hand on the short hair at his nape. And he knows this brief interlude is as normal as it will ever get for him.

It's over, Sam thinks, as the big car eats up the miles and the last few buildings dotting the road out of town dwindle to specks in the rearview mirror.

"It's over," he says out loud, just to make it definite. "It's really over."

Dean glances across from staring idly out the shotgun window. "It's over," he agrees quietly, and they sit in easy silence for a few moments. "Anything interesting on the world wide web?" Dean asks then, as he gazes out at the treeline speeding by.

"Woman murdered in Chicago inside a locked room," Sam recalls from his latest research session. "Middle-aged guy turned up the same way last month. Bodies mutilated, sounds pretty ritualistic. They're calling the unsub the Stealth Killer."

Dean blows out, thoughtful. "We should check it out after we stop by Bobby's."

"You sure you're up to it?" Sam says doubtfully. "Three weeks ago you were in a medically induced coma with a potentially fatal disease."

"I'm up to it. Got to get back on the horse Sammy. And ride 'em cowboy." Dean yawns, stretches.

"So," Sam broaches then. "How's Kathleen?"

"She's feeling good," Dean reports, and Sam can sense him smile. "Of course now she's feeling even better."

Sam rolls his eyes. "No more, please. Leave me with my illusions intact, because—" He reacts instinctively, slams the brakes on, and the car screams to a halt, veering half off the road, tires tearing a groove on the blacktop.

Dean yelps as he's flung forward, reaches out to brace with his hands before he hits the dash, squeaks out a faint _fucking-fuck_ as he instinctively jams his feet down into the footwell. "Christ. _Foot_. Christ."

But Sam is already tumbling out of the car, falling on his hands and knees and pushing up, and he lurches along the side of the car, staring back down the road where it curves over the hill, heavily forested now they're a few miles out of Hibbing. He can feel his breakfast coming back at him because he knows he wasn't imagining the figure he saw flicker into view in the rearview mirror.

"What the fuck?" Dean snaps from behind Sam, and he looks back to see that Dean is limping up beside him.

Sam glances from his brother back down the road, empty now, and his guts do a slow, deep roll inside him that tells him he's about to hurl. Sure enough he does, twisting and retching hard into the grass.

"Jesus," Dean mutters, and he retreats, but a minute later he's back, handing Sam a handful of Kleenex and a bottle of water.

"Get back in the car, Dean," Sam barks between spits, and he wipes furiously at his face, strides back to the Impala, his brother trailing in his wake.

"Are you sick?" Dean presses. "Sam?"

"I'm fine," Sam insists. "Something didn't agree with me but I'm good now. Come on, we're leaving."

Dean frowns at him as he gets in the car. "Better out than in," he announces, as Sam maneuvers the car back onto the road.

"Yep," Sam says tightly, as he floors the gas.

Dean throws a few more curious glances in Sam's direction before his head starts to cant and loll, and he finally slumps against the shotgun window. And Sam breathes deep, in, out, rolls his shoulders, forces himself to watch the white lines the car vacuums up as it purrs along, and tells himself his eyes are playing tricks on him.

Back aways, the air crackles then goes hazy, and it flickers into phase again.

And then the big man turns and walks back into the woods.

**The End**

**Read the sequel:[Never Come Back](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1020485/chapters/2029807) **


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